


No Place Like Home

by thedevilchicken



Category: The Chronicles of Riddick (2004), The Chronicles of Riddick Series
Genre: Artistic Liberties, Blood, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Collars, Developing Relationship, Explicit Sexual Content, Extended Families, Fight Sex, Fights, Furyan, Hopeful Ending, Knives, Lack of Communication, Light Masochism, M/M, Minor Character Death, Minor Injuries, Post-Canon, Rough Sex, Violence, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-03
Updated: 2015-08-03
Packaged: 2018-04-12 19:38:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 32,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4492161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-<i>Riddick</i>, Riddick returns to the fleet. The next stop is Furya: he's surprised by what he finds there, about his own past and about Vaako's.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Place Like Home

**Author's Note:**

> This follows the theatrical version of _Chronicles of Riddick_ (so assume no shiny handprints or hallucinations!). I'm assuming Riddick really did get his eyes shined in Slam City, and taking vast, sweeping liberties with what we do/don't know about both Necromonger and Furyan society.
> 
> The characters in the stories Vaako tells might seem familiar if you've seen many other Karl Urban films!

When he made it back to the fleet, he really didn’t expect what he found. 

To be fair, he hadn’t been particularly interested in rejoining the fleet to start with. He’d thought maybe he’d find a nice, quiet planet with enough modern conveniences that he wouldn’t feel like he’d sacrificed every last shred of comfort in his entire existence just to avoid the goddamn Necros, find a really fucking busy planet with enough people bustling around that he could fade into the background and pretend he wasn’t even there, and maybe they could stop sending fleets of mercs after him though hell, that was pretty much what he did for sport these days. Still, after a while he’d gotten bored of taking jobs in mining camps, jobs tending bars like he cared about people’s troubles over cheap tequila, jobs piloting ships with dubious cargo to say the least, reminding himself that _I don’t like this guy_ wasn’t a justification for defenestration. Sometimes it seemed like it was so he did it anyway.

And besides, he _really_ wanted to fuck Krone up. The smug-face Necro bastard deserved it if anyone did.

They weren’t hard to find. After all, the Necromonger fleet wasn’t exactly inconspicuous, wasn’t exactly trying to hide because who the hell did they have to be scared of, so he picked up their trail somewhere out past the Tangier system, heading into Lupus like that wouldn’t fuck up inter-system travel for half the known universe, and was catching them up in a couple of weeks. When the Necro hail came from the command vessel asking who he was and what he wanted, he answered _it’s your fucking Lord Marshal_ and some bastard sense of duty or honour or some other dumbass lunacy he’d never really understood and probably never would meant they couldn’t just blow him out of the sky. They probably should’ve and spared them all some trouble.

They opened a docking bay for him. He pulled the ship inside while they were still in flight, landed, waited as they repressurised the area and then got out, left the piece of shit ship he’d stolen somewhere near Ursa Luna though he’d never felt like getting that close to Slam City ever again right where it was and marched right into the throne room, entirely unchallenged by anyone at all. The soldiers in the corridors, the guards on the doors, well, it wasn’t their place to challenge him. Again with the dumbass Necromonger code of conduct.

“Riddick,” Krone said, stepping down from the throne in his pretty new armour like a fucking king of kings and not a traitor. “We thought you were dead.” 

Riddick put his hands on his hips, tilted his head. “You mean you thought you killed me,” he said. 

“Just so.”

And so the first order of business was to hack off Krone’s traitorous fucking head with the nearest sharp object, and in a Necro ship like that one they weren’t exactly in short supply. No one tried to stop him as he swung the axe, no one except Krone and he wasn’t exactly prepared for it. Maybe he’d expected some sort of warning, time to prepare, time to take off some of the dumbass new armour because he could barely move his arms at all, a proper fight with rules and spectators and not just his head rolling on the floor in ten seconds flat. The blade was sharp. It didn’t take more than one swing. 

“Get that steaming pile of shit out of here,” Riddick said. He gestured to the two closest armoured soldiers and they did exactly as they were told as Riddick took a seat, _his_ seat; the throne was just as damned uncomfortable as he remembered it, something about Necros not feeling pain after purification but hell if he was going to sit there long without some kind of effective padding for his ass. 

“Now, someone tell me: where the fuck is Vaako?”

***

The Necromongers didn’t do prison cells well in the slightest. Riddick guessed it wasn’t a surprise since taking prisoners wasn’t really their thing, but the cells were pretty goddamn dire and he’d seen a few in his time. There were twelve of them, small, a john and wash basin there in each because if there was one thing Necros couldn’t abide it was the usual, average stink of human waste or just humans in general. No bed, but that wasn’t a shock since as far as Riddick could tell the sons of bitches didn’t sleep at all. But the problem wasn’t the comfort level, it was the obvious damn escapability. He’d’ve found his way out inside half an hour with the way the bars gaped, the way the locks were rusted from disuse and some pretty intense neglect, the fact he could’ve wrenched the damn john off of the wall and put it through the reinforced glass of the slots they apparently used to deliver food to prisoners, when there were any or at least any who actually ate. It wasn’t exactly triple-max. 

Of course, the only occupant there in any of the cells was Vaako, and the same idiot sense of duty and honour that bound the rest of them apparently still bound him because though Riddick was pretty damn sure Vaako could’ve broken out just the same as he could himself, though he probably didn’t have half as much as experience in jailbreaks, he was just sitting there on the floor of the cell looking part way between stoic and annoyed. To be frank, that seemed to be his default expression.

“Well, well,” Riddick said, leaning one shoulder against the bars at the front of the cell, crossing his arms over his chest. “What the fuck happened to you?”

Vaako looked up, a sardonic twist to his lips as he crossed his own arms, too. “The same thing that happened to you, I imagine,” he replied. 

“Krone?”

“Krone.”

Riddick paused, looking at Vaako sitting there. The son of a bitch looked exactly the same, minus the armour, in his oddly-patterned jumpsuit; he didn’t even look worse for having spent however long he’d spent in that damn cell. Of course, purification generally took care of pesky human problems like shaving and hair care, eating and the necessity for bathroom breaks. The Necros lived their lives as close to dead as they could manage it, which seemed a _total_ waste to Riddick and he guessed that was why he’d never felt the burning desire to get himself purified. 

He paused another second, just looking at him, then he stooped to the food slot and he posted through Krone’s fucking head. 

“For you,” he said, gesturing to it grandly. “To remember him by.”

Vaako moved across the room, took out the head, held it up by the ears since Krone had entirely lacked in hair to use as a convenient handhold. “Pleasant,” Vaako said, nonplussed, and set it down in the toilet bowl, the head peering out with eyes just above the rim. Riddick gave a low huff of amusement; frankly he couldn’t think of a better place in the universe for the jackass to wind up.

Vaako washed the blood from his hands in the basin and sat back down on the floor, crosslegged with his back against the wall and a hand on each knee as he held Riddick in the same steady gaze. He didn’t ask if Riddick was going to release him. Riddick didn’t offer to. 

“I’ll be seeing you,” Riddick said, and walked away. He didn’t wait for a response.

***

Politics fucking bored him, but he could play the game and so he did. He found out what the fleet’s next plans were, the names of the planets on their list, spoke to his commanders like he gave a damn about the grand Necromonger scheme. The lot of them were humourless, dour, pretty much everything Riddick had come to expect of the Necros during his previous short stay, but they seemed competent enough. Of course, _Krone_ had always seemed pretty competent; competence wasn’t necessarily a sign that they weren’t out to get him. What he needed was people he could trust, and there was _no one_ there he could trust. Except, maybe, perhaps, and it was pretty fucking dumb when he gave it more than cursory thought, except perhaps Dame Vaako.

She laughed when she came to him, answering his order, when she heard what he had to say. He couldn’t say he blamed her because it sounded fucking nuts even to him, maybe especially to him, but she took a seat on the steps beneath the throne. He’d apparently decided to impress her with the grandeur of the situation but she sat there, her back ramrod straight in the awkward position she’d taken. She looked at him over her shoulder and quirked a brow.

“You want to make me your adviser,” she said, a statement, not a question. “That’s ridiculous.”

“Think about it,” he said. “You wanted power. I’ll give you power.” 

“The power to listen to rumours and tell you tales about your commanders. To keep you alive and on the throne.”

“Yeah,” Riddick agreed, because maybe it worked best if he put it bluntly. “And to keep yourself right up there with me.” 

She smoothed her long dress down over her thighs as she looked up at him, crossed her legs at the knee beneath it though it was almost too tight for her to do so. “I already have a husband, Marshal.”

“Good. ‘Cause I’m not looking for a wife.” He stood, took three steps down and offered her his hand. “I’m looking for a first among commanders.” And that, it seemed, was enough to get her attention.

“You know what that means?” she asked, her tone and her gaze both steady.

He nodded. “Yeah. You’d be my heir.” 

She took his hand; she stood; she smiled like fucking poison. On his death, she’d take his place. Riddick would never be purified and they both knew it, so all she had to do was wait or kill him and if anyone but her were to get there first then she’d lose her place, that much he understood about Necromonger law, at least. She’d protect him, and so all he’d have to worry about was her. 

“Then I accept,” she said. “I’ll be your First.”

***

Two days later, he went back to the cells. 

“I hear you’re employing a new guard dog,” Vaako said, entirely neutral.

“Word gets around, huh. Even down here.”

Vaako shrugged to concede the point, sitting there against the wall. Riddick wasn’t even sure he’d changed position since the last time he’d been there and maybe he hadn’t. “She’ll be effective.” He rested his head back against the wall, eyeing Riddick closely as he did so. “Smart move.”

Riddick took a seat in the corridor there between the two facing rows of cells, on the floor just like Vaako with his back to the bars of the empty cell opposite his. He’d refused much in the way of armour this time, had something sleeveless with leather bracers that buckled at his wrists like a pair he’d had once before. He wanted the freedom to move the way he liked to move, quick, unencumbered, not like Krone had been as he’d died. No one gave a good goddamn if he looked the part or not because to the underlings at least he was undisputedly their lord marshal. The rest, Dame Vaako would take care of. 

“She’ll try to kill me, right?”

“Likely.”

“Soon?”

“She’ll give herself time to become better established,” Vaako said. “She’ll want to show the others her competence. You have two years, maybe three. Maybe five.” Vaako paused, still looking Riddick over with that same infuriatingly neutral expression. “Time means very little when you age the way a Necromonger does. She can wait.”

Riddick understood. He’d seen it, after all; purification spun out the bastards’ lives like they’d been stuck at the age they’d converted and if the process didn’t take then the Purifer would slit their throats.They had a new one, a replacement, a woman with a shaven head and silver points to her fingertips and Riddick wondered if she didn’t do the job with those. They’d probably be pretty effective. _She_ seemed to be, at least.

They sat in silence after that, a few more minutes, maybe ten, though the stink of Krone’s decomposing head still sitting there in the toilet bowl wasn’t exactly pleasant company. It was quiet in the cells; they’d done the sensible thing and put the jail block right at the heart of the ship near the engine cores so all they could hear was the hum of energy through the walls and floors, heat seeping in so the place was the kind of temperature Riddick found comfortable and not the fucking ice box that was the rest of the ship. Sometimes he wore a cape clipped to the shoulders of his sparse upper armour just to guard against the cold, surprised he couldn’t see his breath on the air. He suspected they filled it full of chemicals just so that wouldn’t happen, like the reminder they all had to breathe was distasteful somehow.

He didn’t offer to release him; Vaako didn’t ask him to. They didn’t say a word about the fact that he was keeping him right where he was even now that Krone was dead. 

“I’ll be seeing you,” Riddick said, as he pulled himself back up to his feet. 

“I expect you will,” Vaako replied, and didn’t move a muscle. 

Riddick walked away. He didn’t doubt for a second he’d be back.

***

She was perfect for the job, as he’d been pretty sure she would be. 

She’d refused to dress the part but no one had actually pressed her to; she added a line of sharp spikes to the metal spine that ran down the back of her dress, three rows of them over each shoulder, but she wouldn’t wear the armour and frankly Riddick didn’t want her to. He was happy enough for her to wear bright blood red and make the other commanders frown at her because of it. Choosing her hadn’t exactly been a move toward maintaining the status quo so she could fuck it up in whatever way she wanted to as far as he was concerned. And she never once asked about her husband, right from the start.

There was a planet coming up that they were set to invade and Riddick put her in charge of that because she seemed like the best one for the job. He hadn’t bothered learning the ropes the first time round so he had no fucking clue what he was doing and if he delegated it just made more sense to all concerned. Vaako had actually suggested it, the third time he’d been to the cells to see him, and then he’d started to tell him things he’d need to know about Necromonger law if he was going to be lord marshal and not wind up tossed out of a docking bay or left behind on a conveniently devastated planet in the wake of an invasion. The topic was dry as fuck but he guessed at least it might be useful if he could stay awake or maintain focus.

Dame Vaako led the invasion, in her blood red dress and assorted spikes, and she was perfect. They surrendered quickly and submitted to conversion with Riddick sitting there imperious behind her as she spoke. If he hadn’t been pretty sure he could’ve put her down in six seconds flat, he might’ve been as scared as the planet’s leaders clearly were. He could see why Vaako had married her.

“Aereon _really_ fucked up if she thought I’d help,” Riddick said, as he settled himself down against the bars down in the cell block once they were back underway, back up in space. 

“Maybe she didn’t mean you to help,” Vaako said. “Elementals are notoriously unpredictable.”

Riddick stretched out his legs and crossed them at the ankle. “You wife tells me she wanted to kill her.”

“Maybe she should have. Or maybe she’d have come back to haunt us.”

Riddick chuckled lowly. “Says the guy who worships death.”

Vaako shrugged, and he sat there just like the smell of Krone’s rotting fucking head sitting there a few feet away didn’t bother him at all, calm as a monk. Riddick guessed he’d been cultivating that infuriating skill for years, since whatever his homeworld was had been taken by the Necros and suddenly it was like a fucking thorn in his side that he didn’t know _anything_ about the guy, knew nothing about any of them, had no idea how long Vaako had been there or who he’d been before. Frankly he wasn’t sure why he gave a damn but there it was.

“How old are you?” Riddick asked, suddenly, and at least it broke the silence if nothing else. 

Vaako shrugged again. “I don’t remember,” he replied. “I don’t feel time the way I used to.”

“But you remember your life before this, right?”

“Yes.”

“So, what was your name?”

Vaako paused and then he smiled, darkly but there was a glint to his eye Riddick hadn’t seen before. 

“Let me tell you a story,” he said.

***

The first time, he said his name was William. 

He said back before the Necromongers came to Earth he’d been some kind of agent, trained to kill, trained to make a death look exactly however his superiors wanted it to look. He knew weapons, he said, had been a crack shot with a handgun or a rifle, could kill hand-to-hand if he needed to and pretty often he did. He’d been in some kind of armed force before that, he said, maybe the Marines, maybe not, who knew. He remembered a uniform and medals but didn’t recall what any of them were for. He’d only ever failed once, he said, but he’d failed for some nameless Greater Good. And then the Necromongers came.

Riddick told him to stand back, keep back, and sent in two guards to remove the miserable goddamn head from Vaako’s cell, twelve days after he’d left it there. Vaako didn’t make a move the whole time they were in there with the cell unlocked. He didn’t even try to get out.

The second time, he said his name was Leonard. 

“You don’t look like a Leonard,” Riddick said, and Vaako sighed like he’d heard that a hundred times before. He told him about medical school, at least as much as he said he could remember, orderly dorms and disorderly nights out, a pretty blonde nursing student who he’d dated once upon a time, a surgery that went wrong till he’d had his hands wrist-deep in a man’s chest on an operating table. He remembered time of death but not the date, not that that mattered. Dates were pretty damn inconsistent across systems by then anyway.

“You still don’t look like a Leonard,” Riddick said, when he was finished. Then he sent through a clean change of clothes that didn’t stink like a decomposing corpse and watched Vaako change into them. His skin was covered in scars; he didn’t ask how he’d got them.

The third time, he said his name was Joe. 

The description was vivid. Riddick had been to planets where the cities sprawled massively so it was easy to imagine exactly what that was like, had been to planets with interesting justice systems so that was easy to imagine, too. Vaako described the badge at his chest with his name on it, the gold eagle at his shoulder and the gun in his hand. He told him the names and crimes of the people he’d executed right there on the spot and yeah, it was easy to see him do that, too. If it hadn’t been so much fictional bulshit, it might’ve made sense.

That night, he opened the door to the cell and he left it open. When he came back the next day, Vaako hadn’t moved at all; he was still right there, sitting back against the wall.

“If I let you out of here, what are you gonna do?” Riddick asked, two months since he’d been back. 

“I have no place out there,” Vaako replied. “Krone took it from me and you’ve not given me anything else.”

Riddick sighed as he leaned on the bars by the open cell door. “Let me guess,” he said. “That’s the Necromonger way.”

Vaako shrugged, still sitting there on the floor, which probably meant yes. Riddick sighed again. 

“Then I’ve got a job for you,” he said.

***

Riddick got his first good night’s sleep in two whole goddamn months that night, what passed for night in space with a fleet full of monsters who didn’t need to rest, never mind sleep. He slept with Vaako posted outside by the door, leashed to the handle like a dog. The collar at his neck was a rounded metal loop that padlocked over the nape of his neck; Riddick had thought it was hilarious as he put it on him till Vaako had had no reaction whatsoever, just stood stock-still and let him do it. Fucking Necromonger code of conduct, ruining his fun just like it always did.

He woke after the first good night’s sleep in two whole months, a night where he’d not wondered if _this_ night was the one when Dame Vaako would come into his rooms to kill him. Sure, Vaako had given it two years at least, and it made no goddamn sense to trust Vaako to guard the door but _not_ trust his word on that particular point, but no one ever said lords marshal had to make any fucking sense at all. He could be just as irrational as he liked, and would be just to spite them if needs be.

He woke and he ate, some weird-ass hydroponically grown protein that had never tasted good but he guessed he’d tasted worse, and Dame Vaako came to his room, ignoring her husband at the door as she entered. They spoke as he drank from a flask of recycled water - again, he’d tasted worse but also so much better - and he rubber-stamped her plans. She was good at what he had her doing, basically running the whole damn fleet while he figured out what the hell he was actually doing there at all, if boredom had really meant figureheading a fleet of death-worshipping jackasses was the only viable alternative. He spent his days learning pieces of what he’d need to know to really _be_ Lord Marshal of the Necromongers, but he knew deep down he had no interest in that at all. And sometimes he went down to the training rooms and he fought with the troops, but even _that_ couldn’t hold his interest. He couldn’t really kill the trainers and they were the only ones who were even nearly at his level, at least enough for it to be fun. It said nothing good for his morale when even a shiv to the sweet spot now and then couldn’t get his motor running. Then again, he guessed he’d been exhausted. It wasn’t like he needed a whole lot of rest but fuck it, he needed _some_.

“He looks good this way,” Dame Vaako said as she left the room, patting his face before she swept away down the corridor. Vaako ignored her. Riddick laughed, the laughter echoing. 

The sound Vaako made when Riddick tugged at the leash, pulled the collar tight against his throat, was somewhere between surprise and displeasure. Necros didn’t feel pain but that didn’t mean they didn’t _feel_ , Riddick knew that much because Vaako had explained it to him, how purification didn’t dull the senses but rerouted them, retrained them. It didn’t hurt, but that didn’t mean he had to like it. But he turned and he went inside with him without complaint.

They went into the room and Riddick closed the door behind them, plunged them both into darkness but that was fine for Riddick, at least. He’d smashed out the lights after the first few nights because he didn’t need it, didn’t want it, could avoid the glass on the floor that he didn’t feel inclined to clear away. He heard it crunch under the heels of Vaako’s boots; _that_ was why he’d left it there, so the sound would wake him if he needed it to.

“She’s running the whole fleet,” Vaako said. 

“Yeah, she is.”

“That’s dangerous.”

“ _She’s_ dangerous.” Riddick sat back down at his table and picked up his cup of damned recycled water. He left Vaako there, standing on the glass. “Do you love her?” 

“I don’t know what that feels like,” Vaako replied. 

“Never been in love?” 

“Once.”

“What was your name?” 

“I didn’t have a name.” 

And so that was that: the fourth time, he said he didn’t have a name. 

He’d been a hunter, he said, as he stood there in the dark with his heels on broken glass. He’d hunted things that lived in the night and he’d been good at what he’d done, like he’d always been good at everything. He’d held silver blades in his hands and spilled black blood, gone down on his knees in the dirt to pray to God because in the start he’d had faith that was enough for five people, ten. He’d been quick and deadly then he’d died, said he didn’t like the word _vampire_ but maybe that was what he’d been, he thought. He’d put away his crosses then, put away his God, and seen his dearest, nameless friend betray him. He’d loved that friend, he said, remembered the fact but not the feeling, remembered nights when they couldn’t touch because their church and their calling forbade it. He didn’t look like he was lying but, of course, he never did. 

Riddick tugged on the leash and brought Vaako down, right down on his knees in the glass. He’d meant to do it, just to see how he reacted; Vaako knelt there, eyes staring into darkness, perfectly still on his bleeding knees, and Riddick knew what he’d do with him. 

“No more purification,” he said and Vaako nodded though his mouth twitched in something not unlike alarm. 

Riddick wanted him to feel. 

*** 

“If you all want to go to the Underverse, why the hell don’t you just _go_?” Riddick asked. “Let the rest take care of themselves.” 

Dame Vaako sighed a hefty sigh, a long-suffering sigh, and shook her head. “That’s not how it works,” she said, like she was talking to a child and Riddick guessed maybe he was young enough in comparison for it to seem that way, who knew. “You know that. As we purge this verse of those mistakenly born into it, we will populate the underverse and make it ready. When all life has been eradicated, when there is no one left to breed life into this hostile verse, the Necromongers will go there, too.” 

“That’s insane,” Riddick said. 

“Vaako, can’t you explain this to him?” 

Vaako, leashed to remains of a wrought metal light fixture on the wall by the door, sitting there crosslegged on the floor in the few square feet that he’d cleared of glass, just made a vague gesture with his hands. 

“I have,” he said. “The problem is _not_ that he misunderstands.”

“Don’t let anyone else hear you speak like this,” Dame Vaako told Riddick, as she rose from the table and started for the door. “Questioning the faith is against our law.”

She removed the night vision goggles and Riddick covered his eyes for a second as she opened the door and let herself out, closing the door behind herself.

Five months since he’d come back, five months of Dame Vaako at the head of the fleet behind a figurehead shaped just like Richard B Riddick. They’d taken two planets in that time and Vaako was only ever the width of a room away from him, the length of a leash. It was useful to have him there if irritating on occasion; he had a propensity toward talking when Riddick wanted him to shut his fucking mouth but he guessed if he’d been that invested in silence he would’ve shut his damn mouth for him. 

“Do you believe in God?” Riddick asked, leaving the table, moving closer. 

“I believe in _a_ god,” Vaako said. “The god of the underverse.”

Riddick chuckled. “You’re not even being ironic,” he said. “You believe the Necromongers need to purge the universe of life so the underverse gets full of shiny, happy fucking people?”

“I believe in a universe without pain, that welcomes life and isn’t hostile to it.”

“Life isn’t life without pain.” Riddick tugged the end of the leash from the light fixture and used it to urge Vaako to his feet, not that he needed a whole lot of urging. Then he backhanded him straight across the face, hard, so hard he split his lip and blood welled up there in it. “Do you feel that?”

“Yes.”

“Do you _really_ feel that? Does it hurt?”

Vaako sucked on his lip, licked the blood away like he’d done so many times before because this was far from the first time, _far_ from it. He’d been checking daily, for the past three months. He’d been pricking him with pins, pulling hair, pressing his hands around Vaako’s neck and squeezing hard. He’d never felt a thing, he said, and from the way he reacted as if nothing had happened at all Riddick had to believe him. It was starting to get really fucking annoying. 

“I don’t know what hurt feels like,” Vaako said. “Sometimes the effects of purification can linger for years, perhaps indefinitely. We’ve not experimented with withdrawal to find out.”

“And that’s what you think the underverse feels like?”

“I think the underverse is numb,” Vaako said.

“And that’s what you _want_?”

“Don’t you?”

Riddick wrapped the leather of the leash around his knuckles, squeezing, flexing tight so it bit in, so it hurt. “I think pain makes pleasure feel like pleasure,” he said. “I think all you fucking monsters have forgotten what that feels like.”

Vaako paused, and then he shook his head. “We feel pleasure,” he said. “I know exactly what that feels like.”

***

They took the next planet after another three weeks, Dame Vaako in her bright red dress taking no prisoners but a good number of new converts to replace the ones they’d lost in the fighting and then some, another hundred thousand to add to their fleet. Riddick wasn’t sure if he was starting to care about the ones they didn’t take and just killed on the spot or if the idea of so many people without feeling in the universe was just kinda sad. 

He went outside on the planet before they’d killed it off, the end of the leash in his hand and Vaako just a few steps behind him. It was a world like so many others but not one he’d known, though he was pretty surprised since he’d gotten out of a double-max one time in the next system over. There were no people in the streets, only bloodied bodies and Necromonger troops. The air was acrid with gunfire, the after-effects of energy weapon discharge and burned gunpowder. He thought maybe he’d go along on the next invasion, since sending the occasional crappy fighting soldier to the underverse from the training rooms had worn thin months ago, and maybe that was when he came up with the idea. 

Back in his rooms, he left on his goggles and brought in a set of lamps. He turned them on and Vaako frowned at him; he was probably used to spending hours awake in the dark by then, unable to see. Riddick cleared a space, pushed the furniture back, and then he unclipped the leash from the collar at Vaako’s throat. 

“Hit me,” he said. So Vaako did that, no hesitation, a straight closed fist to his jaw. He let him do it. “So, you remember how.”

If Vaako had ever deigned to roll his eyes in his whole damn life, he would’ve done so then. As it was, all he did was put his hands on his hips and half-smirk at him. He may have been Riddick’s prisoner and guard dog for the past six months but he’d never exactly acted that way, which Riddick guessed was why he’d never gotten tired of him. At least not so far.

“I want you to fight me,” Riddick said. “I’m betting you’ve got more oomph left in you than any of our shitty fucking soldiers.”

And so Vaako did that, too. He struck out and Riddick dodged him, brought up his knee into Vaako’s belly and winded him but Vaako caught him with one elbow and sent him spinning away. Riddick laughed, came back in, and even with months of inaction Vaako was fucking _quick_ , precise, maybe from long years of practice but who the fuck knew how old he was anyway. He shoved Vaako’s face into the table; Vaako pushed him up against a wall. They traded blow for blow, adrenaline up like it hadn’t been in months, like it hadn’t been since the goddamn merc outpost and Dahl and Johns and the fucking serpents in the rain or maybe even before that, years ago. 

Sometimes he missed the _other_ Johns, Johns Junior, Billy the fucking Kid, because no one’d got his adrenaline pumping like Billy Johns in longer than he cared to think about. Maybe Vaako had had his no-name forbidden same-sex love affair and maybe that was all just so much bullshit, but Riddick _had_ had Johns. He missed his bunk in the transport back years ago in the Wailing Wars, smelling like sex and liquor. He even missed the goddamn chases, back before Johns was addled with morphine and maybe even after that, too. Yeah, so it was overboard to say he’d let himself get caught just so Johns could catch him but sometimes he’d let him get close. 

Vaako struck him across the face and Riddick spat out blood onto the floor that was _still_ covered with glass. Vaako wasn’t Johns, was nothing like the guy, but fuck it was fun to watch all that sublimated fucking anger come pouring out of him. He had that in common with the blue-eyed merc, at least.

They wound up on the floor, Riddick straddling Vaako’s thighs, Riddick’s hands at Vaako’s throat pressing down over the padlocked collar. Glass pressed uncomfortably at Riddick’s knees through the tough fabric of his pants and Vaako looked up at him. Vaako was breathless, glass in his back, eyes dark and darkening, widening. 

“I can feel that,” Vaako said, surprised. “It hurts.”

***

Vaako was a pretty shitty bodyguard when Riddick had to start keeping an eye on him. 

It was really fucking dumb. He caught him pushing a pin into the fleshy part at the base of his thumb when he woke up the next morning, bruised and aching in that good post-brawl way, squeezing to watch the blood come up. That was how it started. 

The next thing was the glass that Riddick had to order cleared away after a couple of days, when he’d woken up at whatever arbitrary time they’d decided was morning and found Vaako scratching himself with pieces of it, sometimes not even hard enough to draw blood but the second morning he did it deep enough that Riddick found himself sitting there like a fucking idiot sewing up his forearm while Vaako watched, wincing and smiling and wincing at it. 

Then he shut his hand in the door, broke the skin and raised a bruise so bad he could barely move his fingers for three days, which was pretty fucking unhelpful when all was said and done. Riddick cleaned it out with antiseptic and bandaged it up, wondering what sort of a monster he’d created till Vaako purposely dislocated his shoulder and yeah, he’d created a huge fucking monster. One hand tight around Vaako’s wrist, he popped his shoulder back into place and then slapped him in the face. 

“Do that again,” Vaako said. 

Riddick dropped his face into his hands. “There is something _really_ fucking wrong with you,” he said. But then he hit him again anyway. 

It was hard to fight with someone who wanted to hurt himself just to see how it felt, but they did it anyway. Vaako hit him hard enough to make his own knuckles bleed, Riddick’s teeth grazing skin in involuntary fight bites that they’d have to wash out before they got infected. Riddick tucked his fingers into the collar at Vaako’s neck and used it to bounce his head off of the floor, wrapped his hands around his throat and pressed there till he passed out. It was stupid, total fucking lunacy, but Vaako came around with a swift slap and smiled at him faintly, punch-drunk. Then he bent one finger back until it broke and Riddick spat a curse at him.

“You’ve gotta stop hurting yourself,” Riddick told him, sitting there, watching him over the table. He was already pressing his fingers to his injured knuckles and Riddick despaired, just fucking despaired, reached over the table and grabbed his wrists. “Stop it. Just fucking _stop it_ , okay?”

Vaako raised his brows, still perfectly calm. “I thought you wanted me to feel,” he said. 

“I didn’t think you were gonna turn into some fucking idiot masochist,” Riddick replied. “At some point you’re gonna do something I can’t repair.”

Vaako shrugged, turning his wrists in Riddick’s hands, making him tighten them. “You don’t want me to?”

“Shit.” Riddick dropped Vaako’s hands. “You’re gonna take it too far and I’m gonna kill you.”

Vaako raised his brows. “You don’t want to?” he asked, casual, like he was asking the time of day, except there was something else under it that Riddick couldn’t figure out.

There was no good way to answer that question and so he didn’t. He stalked around the table and he kissed him instead.

***

“You heal pretty fast,” Riddick said, checking Vaako’s knuckles the following morning. 

“Let me tell you a story,” Vaako said, and Riddick prepared for another tall fucking tale. 

The fifth time, he said his name was John. He said he was an orphaned twin, angry, a Marine with impossibly large guns and a larger chip on his shoulder, in a team full of assholes and miscreants who weren’t fit for any other work in the world. They went to Mars and there was something there, something in the research labs, something none of them had really wanted to see and that they’d really not been able to control. And he’d taken something, his twin sister had made him take something, that had made him stronger and faster and smarter, made him heal quicker. It was a fairy tale, but it was a hell of a story.

“I’m not calling you John,” Riddick said, once he was done. 

Vaako shrugged, winding the length of his long braid around his fingers, pulling tight. “Call me whatever you like, Lord Marshal,” he said, and mock-saluted. Riddick slapped his hand away from his hair before he could manage to pull it out and they sat there in silence until the knock at the door finally came. He had an appointment with his First Among Commanders and she was never, ever late. 

She didn’t ask what had happened to Vaako. She didn’t ask what had happened to _him_ , though they were both bruised and bandaged and in one hell of a collective state. He wasn’t sure what she was assuming as she looked at them, at him and then at Vaako, at bandages and bruises, but he could see pretty clearly she was assuming something. Still, all she said was she’d found a small band of dissenters in their midst and she’d like his permission to deal with them herself; he could see the harm in that, of course, pitting factions against factions, but he couldn’t think of a single sane reason to say no to her under the circumstances. She left satisfied with one last glance at Vaako, the husband she’d barely spoken to in months, and closed the door. 

“What do you think?” Riddick asked. 

“I think she thinks we’re having sex,” Vaako said. 

Riddick huffed, amused. “That’s not what I meant.” 

Vaako smiled, faintly, wryly, from his spot on the floor by the door. “I know,” he said, rubbing at his knuckles. “And she’s right. You don’t have a choice.” 

He pulled himself up from the floor and walked over to the table in the dark; Riddick could see he was counting steps so he wouldn’t trip and wouldn’t walk into a table or a chair, and he took a seat. The leash at his neck tied to the light fixture was pulled tight, just enough play in the length of leather that he could sit down, albeit with his head tilted back, his back perfectly straight. Riddick pulled on his goggles and flicked on the lights, making Vaako blink and cover his eyes till they adjusted. 

Nothing much had happened the previous night, just that kiss, rough and awkward and pretty fucking stupid if he said so himself though at least Vaako had stopped hurting himself like an amateur jackass turning pro. Nothing much had happened except the fight and then Riddick had slept in the huge-ass bed like nothing had happened at all and left Vaako there leashed to the wall. Vaako seemed so damn amused by it all the next morning, sitting there in the chair scratching at the back of one hand like he was trying to abrade the damn skin away and he probably was so Riddick reached over and grabbed his wrist to stop him. 

“I told you to stop that shit,” he said. 

“And I’m going to cause myself irreparable damage by _scratching_?” Vaako replied. 

Riddick sighed. He was fucking mouthy for a prisoner. Of course, he hadn’t really been a prisoner in months despite appearances. 

They went to the throne room a half hour later when Dame Vaako called to say they were ready. Vaako clipped the cape to Riddick’s shoulders, half because it looked more impressive and half because the throne room was fucking draughty, and they walked there with the leash in Riddick’s hand and Vaako three steps behind just off his right shoulder. Somehow it always seemed there was no particular shame in it for him and Riddick guessed under Necromonger law that made sense in it’s own damn strange way, where everyone drew status from their proximity to the lord marshal. Official rank said Dame Vaako was the highest after Riddick and made her his official heir, but Vaako was closer; somehow, being there at the end of a leash, sitting on the steps at Riddick’s side like he belonged there, gave him some kind of fucking prestige. That hadn’t been exactly what he’d been going for at the time but he’d decided he could live with it since. 

Dame Vaako despatched the three sowers of discord in short order, slitting their throats with a great deal of vigour and letting them bleed out on the floor. The cuts wouldn’t hurt them, no, but the scene was pretty effective; no one wanted to go on into the underverse that way, branded traitors and dead in disgrace. She tossed the knife to the floor and left them there. 

And then, the room cleared. Slowly, everyone who’d gathered there moved on and moved away, went back to their positions elsewhere in the ship or back to their quarters and Riddick stayed right there, looking at the bodies on the floor. Two men came in, took the bodies away then returned to clean the floor; he watched that, too, as they scrubbed away the blood till there was nothing left to show that anything had happened there at all. It was a pretty fucking apt metaphor for the Necros as a whole, he thought, wiping people out then wiping away all traces, except for the massive obelisks they left to show that world had been purged of life. Riddick reached over, ran his fingers over the shaved sides of Vaako’s hair and made him flinch, turning to look up at him. Vaako didn’t seem particularly purged of life. He looked pissed and intrigued and amused and a dozen other things under that motherfucking veneer of calm that Riddick had the sudden urge to wipe right off his face. 

He reached down and he unclipped the leash from Vaako’s collar, dropped it onto the steps and Vaako glanced at it, pulled it in and folded it around his hand before he looked back up. Riddick stood and so Vaako stood and Riddick pushed him just to watch him fall sprawling off the steps onto the hard stone floor. He didn’t look surprised but he didn’t exactly look calm anymore, either. 

It wasn’t much of a fight after that, but it was still a fight. Riddick jumped down off of the steps and kicked Vaako straight in the ribs; Vaako swept one leg around and dumped Riddick onto the ground on his back. He used his cape to pin him down till Riddick drew a blade and cut the fucking thing away and then Vaako snatched his goggles and that was that, neither one of them really trying like the whole thing was just half-hearted and kinda sad. Vaako stepped on the goggles and broke them quite deliberately; Riddick didn’t see it because he could see fuck all of anything without them, but he heard it. Then Vaako snapped the leash back to his own damn collar and handed the end to him. He led him back to his room - _their_ fucking room, it wasn’t worth denying it when everyone there could see it was true - and back into the dark. 

***

He woke in the morning to find Vaako in the bed with him, or at least _on_ the bed with him, lounging there looking at him through a pair of night vision goggles that Dame Vaako had left there after one visit or another. He looked ridiculous. 

“You look ridiculous,” Riddick said, stretching slowly. He had a vague feeling he should’ve been bothered by the fact Vaako was lying there, head propped up on one arm, _watching_ him, but somewhere along the line Vaako had dropped out of the _threat_ category. Fuck only knew which category he fit into now because Riddick sure as hell didn’t. 

“How else am I meant to see in the dark?”

“You’re not.” 

Vaako sighed dramatically and took off the goggles, dropped them to the floor over the side of the bed with an audible clunk that may or may not have meant they’d broken. Didn’t bother Riddick; he wasn’t the one that needed them.

They’d spent the rest of the previous day in total darkness, after they’d gotten back to the room and closed the door on the perpetual light of the Necromonger ship. Every damn corner of the place seemed to be illuminated like the fuckers were scared of the dark, stark white light that stung at Riddick’s eyes like burning without his goggles and sometimes even with them. Maybe Vaako couldn’t see in the dark but that didn’t mean he had to shut his mouth and he hadn’t, all afternoon, a monologue on Necromonger society since the early days on the homeworld Vaako had never even seen that Riddick had tuned out of like background music as he’d sharpened a blade at the table and wondered what Vaako would do if he held it to his throat except he’d probably enjoy it. He’d told himself he’d go out on the next invasion, like he’d told himself before. 

“How far out from the next planet did she say we are?” Riddick asked, lying there watching Vaako lounge on the sheets that morning. He hadn’t told him he could but Vaako didn’t seem too hesitant to take liberties and he didn’t have to explain who he was talking about because the only _she_ they saw more than once a week was Vaako’s wife. Even the new Purifier they saw less often, though Dame Vaako was probably in constant contact, knowing the way she worked. The Purifer was like the fucking inquisition of the Necromongers, after all, like a filter for rumours about dissenters and those disloyal to the faith.

“Three days,” Vaako said.

He could wait three days, he thought, and he did. He spent a couple of hours in the armoury watching the smiths at work that first day, once he’d found his way there; the way the ship was basically one huge goddamn city and the rest of the ships around it were too was still something he’d never gotten used to, how transports went between them carrying people here and there to new posts, meetings, resupplying. 

The armoury maybe should’ve been pretty damn far from the Lord Marshal’s ship by conventional thinking but Vaako, in his boring-ass multiple monologues, had mentioned the smiths had a kind of venerated status in Necro society because they were the ones who made the weapons that the Necromongers killed with. That, at least, Riddick could understand. And besides, he’d discovered that the place was as warm as the cell block from the flames and that suited him. 

There were three smiths, huge guys that towered over him, heads shaved bald like his and they all wore goggles against the glare so fuck if it wasn’t like meeting a group of Riddicks Senior. They ignored him while he sat there in the corner watching them work and that suited him, too. Everyone else paid him far too much attention as he strode down corridors or tried to find out about the community first hand instead of just from Vaako’s lectures. He drew up a chair, considered his next move for a second and then pulled up a second for Vaako.

“Stay away from the fire,” Riddick said, leaning in close by Vaako’s ear to speak. He could see the way Vaako was eyeing the flames and the red-hot metal. “Don’t you fucking dare burn yourself or I swear to God…”

Vaako looked at him. There was a witty retort about gods and comparative religion there on Vaako’s tongue, Riddick was absolutely positive, but he apparently bit it back. 

Three days passed quickly. They spent hours with the smiths each day, Vaako uncharacteristically quiet but Riddick put that down to the dumbass smith-worship the Necros all had going on. For his part, he went in there on the second day with a sketch he’d made, slid it over the table to the head smith and the guy nodded, burned fingers following the dimensions he’d set out on the page. Then he waved the other two together and they started work. Riddick and Vaako sat down to watch. 

Morning of the third day, they were orbiting their next target; they had invasion proper planned for the afternoon, something about fairer atmospheric conditions that Riddick understood from piloting but honestly couldn’t have given a fuck about since apparently he trusted Dame Vaako’s judgement if not Dame Vaako herself. He took Vaako to the armoury and the smiths met them with four matching blades in leather sheaths that would fit between shoulderblades, four curving blades like Riddick had used before but had sadly lost, with just a couple of modifications in design. He took a pair, gripped them, examined them curving around his fists, felt the weight and nodded his approval. Then he passed the second pair to Vaako.

“Try to bear in mind they’re not for cutting _you_ ,” Riddick said, as Vaako raised his brows at them. “I’m going in with the invasion. Means you’re coming with me.”

Vaako drew his blades, looked at them, formed fists around the hilts and held them up, firelight glinting in the metal. When his gaze flickered back to Riddick, he smiled darkly. 

“It’s about time,” he said.

Fuck knew what that actually meant but Riddick liked the sound of it.

***

He had Vaako’s old armour brought up to the room but Vaako didn’t want it, at least not all of it. He put on a pair of supple leather gloves then his metal vambraces and greaves and Riddick followed suit with his own leather bracers, leather greaves, his one Necro concession the long metal spine piece that ran down the length of his back and shifted easily with his every movement. The sheath of his knives fit as well over the top of it as it did without, like it was designed for that and maybe the smiths had anticipated that need. They seemed to be particularly, peculiarly good at their jobs that way.

They went down with the fifth ship rather than the first, his one concession to Dame Vaako’s apparent concern for his well-being if not for her husband’s. As they landed he reached over and unclipped the leather leash from Vaako’s collar, folded it, tucked it into a pocket, and then they were out in the street with the soldiers. 

It was the most excitement Riddick had felt in months when he drew his blades and went into the fight with Vaako at his back. The people on the planet had guns, a mix of energy and projectile weapons that should’ve been effective but they were poor shots for the most part and when they got in close the Necros all used swords or knives, the occasional mace, and one massive fucker about the size of the smiths had a fucking warhammer he was swinging to devastating effect. Riddick got the impression now and then that if they hadn’t had such a lunatic religion the Necromongers could’ve been his kind of people. It was a pity.

The fighting split up pretty quickly, sections of people fleeing once they’d really seen what they were up against, soldiers deserting the lines. The Necros went after them and two hours in they were spread out in teams, searching houses, dragging people out into the streets to convert or die. He left with Vaako, went after deserted soldiers through a labyrinth of side streets and back alleys, hunting in the dusty streets. The city had been built part way between a river and a desert, the twin suns dipping down in the sky as they went building to building, knives finding throats everywhere they went. Vaako’s blades were just as bloody as Riddick’s were, dripping with it. 

It started to get darker and the Necro fleet had put out the planet’s power but that suited Riddick right down to the ground. They went through stores, bread still burning in bakery ovens, half-eaten food on café tables, into houses where everything had been dropped as the inhabitants ran. It would’ve maybe felt eerie if he hadn’t seen the same exact thing happening back on Helion, homes emptying, soldiers in streets, and maybe he should’ve felt bad or at least kinda weird about being on the opposite side this time. He didn’t. If he had a people of his own, neither side there on this planet were it.

He heard a noise; Vaako heard it too, his head snapping around toward it before he glanced back at Riddick. When a nearby company of soldiers had tramped out of earshot, they could hear voices in the next house along, drifting out through the window into the street. There were soldiers there, hiding, waiting, and so the pair of them went in. 

What happened next happened fast. Riddick went in first, slashed at the first soldier’s neck and got the curve of one blade caught around the guy’s spine. As he yanked at it, trying hard to pull it free, another soldier appeared from the next room; Vaako smashed his nose with his elbow, blood erupting out of it, then buried the points of both his blades just under the guy’s collarbones. They heard the next pair, moved to intercept and he caught a glint in a mirror from the corner of his eye; it was too late to stop his jump and he was fucking dead, _dead_ , the weapon firing at his back until Vaako jumped in calmly and took the bullet for him. Riddick’s blades went into the final soldier, took him down, took him out, and Riddick left them there embedded in his chest as he turned to Vaako on the floor, fallen through a flimsy wooden coffee table. 

He vaulted the heavy couch and went down on his knees in the coffee table’s debris to assess the damage as Vaako grimaced on the floor. He wasn’t dead, at least; the bullet was in his shoulder and he was bleeding but he’d live, even if Necro first aid left a hell of a lot to be desired. Riddick took a blade from Vaako’s hand and cut a strip off his own shirt, six inches over his belly so he wound up with a cropped top looking like he was dressed up like a whore he’d met one time in Slam City, and bound it over Vaako’s shoulder with the leather leash from his pocket.

“You’re trying to get yourself killed,” he said. 

Vaako didn’t look terribly impressed with the situation at hand but he didn’t disagree. Riddick sighed, then he set his jaw and he straddled Vaako’s thighs, leaned down, rested his weight on his hand that was still pressed to Vaako’s wounded shoulder. Vaako grimaced, and Riddick brought one of Vaako’s blades up against his throat. 

“If you’re gonna keep trying, I should just do it now,” Riddick said. “Get it over with.”

Vaako clenched his jaw, tilted his head back as far as he could while pressed to the floor. The motion pressed the blade in just a fraction, brought up a thin line of blood against the curved metal of the blade as his eyes stayed trained on Riddick. 

“So do it,” Vaako said. 

Riddick pushed a fraction harder; blood trickled down over the side of Vaako’s neck, trailed around into the back of his hair. Riddick could’ve cursed because he got it, he did, they were there on the floor in the middle of an invasion playing a game of fucking chicken like a pair of abject dumbasses, Vaako goading him, Riddick about a second away from burying a knife in Vaako’s throat right down to his spine and having done with it. He pulled off his goggles in the low light and he looked at him, leaned in closer, leaned in _close_ and the blade pressed in deeper. Any more and he’d hit something vital and Vaako would bleed out all over the floor and fuck if he knew anymore if he wanted that or not but he’d do it if he had to, that had to be obvious to both of them. But then Vaako’s expression changed in an instant, eyes wider, breath quickening. It wasn’t panic but it was close and so there it was: Vaako wanted to live.

“Stop,” he said. So Riddick stopped. And as he moved to set the blade aside Riddick shifted his hips and fuck, Vaako was hard against him like some motherfucking pervert and okay, yeah, so was he. He looked down at Vaako, bleeding from the shallow wound at his throat, and damn if it wasn’t Vaako who made the first move, who pulled him down, tried to do it with his shot-up shoulder then cursed and used the other hand. He pulled him in and Riddick’s mouth went to that cut at his throat, licked at it till his mouth was bloody and the kiss that came after was slick with it, hard and coppery and he leaned against him, forearms pressing over the ruins of the fucking coffee table Vaako had fallen through and it wasn’t comfortable and it wasn’t even a good idea when they rubbed against each other. The leather-gloved hand of Vaako’s uninjured arm went to the back of Riddick’s shaved head, held him in as they kissed and Jesus fucking Christ it shouldn’t’ve felt so good to be doing that, then or there or at all. 

And then they heard boots marching by the window, froze, stopped, waited for them to pass as they lay there and looked at each other, flushed and faintly bewildered. Riddick wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and came away bloody. Vaako’s neck was a mess of smeared blood and his shoulder was still bleeding through Riddick’s torn shirt. 

“What the fuck are we doing?” Riddick said, once it seemed the coast was clear. He pulled himself up onto his knees, pulled his goggles back on over his head. 

“I can think of six or seven words for it offhand,” Vaako said, the faintest of smiles quirking his lips as he lay there. That response wasn’t comforting.

Riddick wiped his bloodied hands on what was left of his shirt. “We should get back to the ship,” he said. “Your wife’ll wonder where we are.”

***

The invasion went smoothly, if you could ever call invasion smooth. Dame Vaako knew exactly what she was doing, commanding from the ship and then stepping out with a vast escort of guards to walk into the government building, taking the talks to the people on their own ground. He guessed it was something to do with showing them it really was over, that their planet was on its way out and they could convert or die right then and there. They weren’t a religious people, apparently quite pragmatic, and the majority went without too much protest once it was clear the army’s attempts to fend them off had failed. Of course, they didn’t know the majority of them would be dying anyway; the Necros only ever took the strongest, the best, the brightest, and burned the rest with the planet.

The bandaged cut at Vaako’s neck was visible even over the high neck of his suit as they sat there listening to Dame Vaako’s speech. Riddick had dressed it himself, in the dark in his room back on the ship, making Vaako hiss with it, maybe some of that on purpose. And then, after their quick stop back down on the planet they returned to the ship, the soldiers taking the new converts in for purification, and Riddick found himself staring at the scar at one side of Vaako’s neck as they walked, found himself pressing him face-first up against the back of the door once they were back in the room, found himself sucking at the damn scar as he pressed up against his back. A day and a half since that bloody evening in the ruins of a coffee table in a house with no one left alive to live there and fuck if he’d thought of anything else since. He thought maybe it should’ve bothered him but then again a whole fucking mess of things should’ve bothered him.

There was a knock on the door, the door they were leaning against. Riddick felt it in his palms as he leant against it. 

“Not now,” Vaako called through the door. 

“Then when?” Dame Vaako called back. 

Vaako glanced back at Riddick over his shoulder, his look pure dark fucking amusement. “Try again in an hour,” he said, and Riddick could just make out her huff of irritation as she turned to walk away with a click of heels. 

“You know what she’s gonna think,” Riddick said. 

“She already thought it,” Vaako replied. “Let her.”

“And she won’t care?”

Vaako chuckled, resting his forehead down against the door. “You’ve not been paying attention,” he said, drumming his nails against the door. “Necromongers don’t marry for love, we marry for _power_. And power’s not something she currently lacks.”

Then he threw back his head, catching Riddick off guard, his skull connecting with Riddick’s brow and knocking him back. He followed through, twisting, went down on top of him in a heap of limbs on the floor and Riddick let him do it, might’ve let him do it even if he hadn’t been at least partially forced to. Vaako hopped up onto his knees astride Riddick’s thighs, tugged him up to sitting by the straps of the sleeveless armour still covering his torso after the speech down on the planet’s surface, tugged him into a kiss that Riddick returned as he wound Vaako’s braids around his fingers. 

The lamps were on around the room so when Vaako pulled off Riddick’s goggles he was pretty much blinded, squeezed his eyes shut and cursed under his breath. Fortunately he didn’t need to be able to see to topple Vaako onto his back on the floor, follow him over, lie there over him between his thighs and press his mouth to the bandage still over his throat. He felt Vaako take an unsteady breath, his uninjured arm pushing in under Riddick’s armour, nails scratching hard at the small of his back and then with a sound not far from a groan from the bullet wound he brought up his other hand, flicked open the clasps on the armour and pulled it away. Riddick let him, let him push up his shirt and pull that off, too, pulled back to strip Vaako down to his waist with his eyes closed and his fingers fumbling over fabric.Then he went up to his feet and held out a hand to Vaako. He took it; Riddick pulled him up. Of course, he’d given him the hand of the arm with the gun-shot shoulder, maybe just so it’d hurt. 

He pushed him down over the edge of the bed, yanked down at what was left of jumpsuit and ran his hands down over the curve of Vaako’s ass but the light was bothering him; he reached for the nearest lamp and threw it in the direction of one of the others, taking them both out with a clatter and that lowered the light enough that he could open his eyes, looked over Vaako who was looking back at him over his shoulder. 

“What are you going to do?” Vaako asked. 

Riddick answered that by turning Vaako around, sitting him on the edge of the bed like he hadn’t just been thinking about fucking him just like that and Vaako hadn’t been perfectly willing to let him do it. He answered that by going down on his knees and sucking Vaako’s cock straight into his mouth. Neither one of them had been expecting it and when Vaako was done, Riddick gargling dramatically with a mouthful of liquor, there was another knock on the door. 

Riddick retrieved his goggles and went to the table. Vaako rearranged his clothes and went to his side; Riddick could see blood soaking through the gauze at Vaako’s neck, yet again. He’d need another fucking dressing.

“You’re gonna take me to Furya,” Riddick said, as Dame Vaako knocked again. It was nowhere near an hour but he’d learned time was relative when you were living around Necromongers. 

Vaako looked at him then took a seat at his right hand, his fingers gripping the edge of the large, heavy wooden table. They’d probably taken it from another planet, Riddick thought; it didn’t look at all like anything the Necros made, their shit all metal and glass and and stone. There were initials carved in it here and there, gouges, like it was older than either of them though fuck knew how old Vaako really was. 

“I’ll take you this time,” Vaako said, and glanced up at him from the tabletop; there was something odd in his expression, something Riddick couldn’t quite place but pretty much like he just did not want to go, wanted no part of it, like he’d never had any intention of going there and maybe that was why he’d sent Krone. Of course, that’d turned out to be an unmitigated fucking disaster. Then he nodded to himself and he looked away again. 

“Leave the fleet with her,” Vaako said. “Tell her I’m taking you home.” And then, after clenching his jaw just a moment, he called, “Enter.”

***

They left that night, no reason to delay, almost immediately after the meeting. The fleet had left the planet and they’d killed the whole world absolutely dead so there was nothing left for him to figurehead for the moment at least; Dame Vaako didn’t look particularly perturbed by the idea of heading the fleet for the time being, and that wasn’t a surprise. She just authorised the upload of the fleet’s planned course into the nav banks of the crappy skiff Riddick had used to come aboard those months ago and he and Vaako went on board, closed the hatches, lifted off. 

It was a three week trip, Vaako said, then fell uncharacteristically silent. All Riddick knew was Vaako was allegedly the only person left alive who knew where Furya was now the maps were gone, the planet erased from charts and so deep into territories already cleared and killed by the Necros that no one had any business even looking for it. They’d got enough shitty hydroponic protein and recycled water for Riddick to last at least three weeks and Vaako didn’t mention why he thought they wouldn’t need more than that, for the return journey. Still, Riddick guessed at least the purification had only worn off of Vaako enough that he felt pain and didn’t feel the need to chow down on not-quite-synthetic plant protein.

Now and then, he tried to strike up conversation. It was fucking odd that Vaako was barely speaking when all he’d done for months was talk, and maybe that should’ve told him something but he let it slide. We watched Vaako sitting on one of the two shallow bunks in the back of the tiny-ass skiff, pricking his fingers with the point of one of the blades Riddick had had made for him, letting just a pinhead of blood well up so he could suck it away. He was covered in bruises under his clothes, though after the first couple of weeks the cut at his throat had scabbed and then peeled and was now just a faint little line Riddick could only see when he squinted. Damn, he healed fast. He healed as fast as Riddick did.

There were times when Riddick got bored or he got restless and Vaako would be watching him because apparently Vaako liked to watch and so he’d push his pants down over his hips and stroke himself like Vaako wasn’t watching him at all. The first time, Vaako just watched, the leash at his neck hanging across the room, the far end dangling from a point Riddick had discovered on the ceiling that let him get everywhere in the ship without taking it off at all. The second time, Vaako did the same thing, rubbed the heel of his hand over the front of his pants and then pushed them down, matching him stroke for stroke. The third time, he went over, took a seat on the bunk at his side and replaced Riddick’s hand with his, jerked him till he came then washed his hands like nothing had happened. Then, the fourth time, he went down on his knees on the textured metal floor, took Riddick in his mouth and sucked him till he came. It was the weirdest three weeks he’d had in a while, and he’d been some weird fucking places.

When they fucked it was probably out of boredom, Riddick thought, or maybe he just liked to think that. They’d been out for nearly the full three weeks Vaako had said it’d take and Riddick had just taken one of his weekly rationed showers - the rest of the time they stood there like jackasses at the wash basin and used a cloth when things started to get a little ripe. He dried off, wrapped the towel low around his waist and came back out into the cabin and there was Vaako because there was nowhere else for Vaako to be, sitting on his bunk reading some kind of a religious tract that’d probably been stuffed down the side of a bulkhead for the past ten to fifteen years. He put it down and he looked at Riddick like he hadn’t just been giving himself papercuts with the edge of the card and like they didn’t both know that in some twisted way it turned him on and Riddick laughed and tossed his towel aside. 

Vaako looked at him, really _looked_ at him, then got up off the bunk and went over to him. It wasn’t like the ship was huge so the cabin was positively fucking tiny and five steps was all it took for him to get there, where he started to look Riddick over again like the drill sergeant he’d had back in the goddamn Rangers years before. Vaako’s fingers trailed down his spine as he stepped around behind him, hands settled at his hips, moved down, followed the curve of his ass as he stepped right up behind him, clothes against warm, bare skin. And maybe for a moment Riddick thought Vaako was going to go through with it as he planted one hand between Riddick’s shoulder blades and pressed him down firmly over the usually inconvenient table that was bolted to the floor in the centre of the room, as he stepped up behind him and he could feel the press of his erection through the fabric of his skimpy-ass jumpsuit, hands moving to rub his thumbs in the dimples at the small of Riddick’s back. But he didn’t. He stepped back. He stepped away. And while Riddick lounged there bent over the table, head cradled in his hands, Vaako took off his own clothes, folding them all carefully into a neat little pile as he did so.

“Lie down,” Vaako told him. He couldn’t see any good reason not to so he did and Vaako joined him, settling down over Riddick’s thighs with a tube of some sort of grease in hand. Riddick had to guess if Vaako was willing to get it into some intimate places then he shouldn’t be too concerned by this himself and so he let him slick him with it, thick and greasy, then let him settle over his hips and push down. Vaako was looking at him the whole damn time as he guided Riddick’s cock up against his ass, as he rubbed it there for a moment then sat back, pushed down slowly. He could see Vaako’s chest move with his breath, even and steady only because he was forcing it that way as Riddick’s hands went up to squeeze his thighs, as he braced his heels against the bunk beneath them and pushed up, pushed into him. Then he reached up, wrapped his hand around the collar still there at Vaako’s throat and pulled him down into a kiss that he hadn’t even meant to do. 

It was stupid because the guy had been a perfect masochist since he’d gotten his feeling back; it was stupid because when Vaako unexpectedly slapped him across the face he slapped him back and then Vaako’s hands went around his throat, not really trying to hurt him but enough to labour his damn breathing. Riddick’s hips bucked up against him, Vaako flexed to ride him slowly and it was dumb, it was really fucking dumb because who gave a fuck if the guy was married when Riddick had done so many awful fucking things in his life so how did fucking a married man even figure? And goddamnit if he hadn’t been so damn excited since he’d last been with Johns. William fucking Johns had a hell of a lot to answer for.

Riddick squeezed at the still-sore spot at Vaako’s shoulder and that just made him move faster, move harder, the way his hips rocked against Riddick’s maybe harder than it should’ve been. Riddick’s hand went to Vaako’s erection and stroked and fuck, it took forever, it took absolutely fucking forever while Riddick couldn’t catch his breath for the hands at his throat and Vaako clenched his teeth against the pain in his shoulder that just made him harder. Maybe the Necros had screwed with Riddick’s sense of time because it seemed to _last_ , made his muscles ache deeper than they had in months, before Vaako’s hips bucked and he came all over Riddick’s chest and then he came after, who knew how long after but he knew he was still inside him. They were sweaty and too damn hot and Riddick needed another shower so once Vaako had climbed up off of him, flushed and slick and sagging as he leaned down against the table, Riddick went back to the shower. He caught Vaako by the wrist and took him with him; they were going to get the most out of Vaako’s rationed shower, at least.

“Why don’t you tell me a story,” Riddick said, stretching out on his bunk after that, back in his clothes. Turned out he wasn’t the only one who could pilot; Vaako adjusted their course, pulled up the autopilot and came back to join him, sitting crosslegged on the bunk opposite. 

“When we get there,” he said, almost wincing as he said it. “Six hours. Get some sleep. You’ll need it.”

***

When they came into orbit, Vaako came up into the cockpit and into the co-pilot’s seat at Riddick’s side. Riddick watched him transmit a code that made no sense because there was no one on the fucking planet to receive it but he watched him do it anyway and then they went down through the atmosphere, a controlled descent. 

“Here,” Vaako said, tapping coordinates into the nav bank with his usual dexterity. “Land here.”

Riddick understood as they got down closer, skimming over the ruins of a city, towers that had crumbled down from gunfire, the desert blowing over the streets. It was a wasteland, nothing left alive in the city, no one there at all, but that was just the _surface_ : the coordinates took him to a cliff-face and then he saw the way inside and understood why they’d taken the crappy little skiff and not one of the huge-ass Necro flyers. It wouldn’t’ve fit inside. They went in.

There were caves that opened up in there, vast, curving up into the mountains and down beneath, twisting. Riddick liked to think he was a pretty decent pilot but it tested him till he slowed down from his dumbass breakneck speed to something nearing sensible and then after the next turn they came out into a cavern, huge, strewn with parts of ships all dismantled there in disarray. There’d been maybe five of them, he thought, judging by the sections of chassis and engine drives he could see. None of them were intact, but there _were_ people there around them. They had guns trained on the ship and maybe then Riddick got why Vaako had stood over the sink and cut his hair, hacked off the braids and shaved right down to a quarter inch, why he’d pulled on clothes that looked more like they’d come from the Necros’ victims than the Necros themselves. He’d had a set for Riddick too, black pants and a heavy knit sweater that might even’ve been wool and Vaako’s high turtleneck covered the scars at the sides of his neck though the damn metal collar still sat there over the top, the key to the lock hanging on a strand of leather tied around Riddick’s neck. Neither of them was ever going to look entirely normal but they were at least halfway there in those clothes. It looked like they’d need to be.

They landed there, in the first area they found that wasn’t littered with ship parts or other assorted metal crap. They disembarked, down the ramp at the rear of the ship into the huge stone landing bay, and the people there with guns watched them the whole way, eyed them as Riddick eyed them back. They were all solidly built, rugged, muscular, tall, both the women and the men. They looked strong, for all they were living inside a fucking mountain, and all looked like they knew what to do with those weapons they were toting. Vaako had told him to leave the blades in the ship and so he had, like a fucking idiot, and rued it then, hands flexing into fists. Vaako reached out and took his wrist. 

“Don’t,” he said. “You’d be dead before you hit the floor.”

And Riddick started to wonder just why Vaako had known the code to transmit, _how_ he’d known. He didn’t ask why he hadn’t given it to Krone, though maybe the answer was before this he’d wanted him as dead as Krone had.

The ranks of gun-toting people parted and a woman came through, older than the rest, silver hair tied back severely into a bun. She was slim and hard-faced though maybe she’d been pretty once upon a time, before the Necromongers had decided to take her planet and drive her underground. She rested her hands on her hips, by the hilt of a pair of knives sheathed there over the thighs of her worn work pants, and looked at Riddick. Then she looked at Vaako and piece by piece her expression changed, dissolved into something totally different. She frowned, shook her head, narrowed her gaze to look closer and then finally her eyes went wide. 

“Simon,” she said. 

“Kat.”

Riddick frowned. “Simon?” he said. 

Vaako made a face at him that said _shut the fuck up_ just as clearly as he ever could’ve in words, then he turned back to the woman. 

“We thought you’d died,” she said. 

Vaako tucked his fingers into the turtleneck and pulled down, turning his head one way then the other to show the scars there from his purification. “I did,” he said. 

The men and women with the guns came to closer attention, fingers on triggers. 

“And him?” she asked, gesturing at Riddick.

“He’s the Riddick boy,” Vaako said. 

There was a pause then, not quite hushed but something like it as _everyone_ stared at them. More people had arrived, the same sturdy but well used clothes and boots, the same knives and guns, and they _stared_ , too. 

“You came home,” the woman said, her smile faint but present. 

Vaako just nodded. And Riddick, for his part, had no fucking idea what was going on.

***

“My name was always Vaako,” he said, the sixth time.

They were in a room that wasn’t quite a cell, one of many on the paths under the mountain. Not everything was carved from stone in there though many things were and the room itself was one of them. Vaako said it was from the earliest part of the settlement, when the surface of Furya had been inhospitable to say the least, back when the people had been miners and not the planet of five million they’d been by the time the Necromongers came. 

“ _Simon_ ,” Riddick said. 

Vaako shrugged. “Simon Vaako,” he said. “Did you really think I was Joe or John or _Leonard_?”

“I’m not calling you Simon.”

Vaako didn’t ask him to. He barely said anything else at all.

The woman came for Vaako maybe an hour later, when Riddick still had questions; she tried to take him alone but Vaako shook his head and told her Riddick came with him or neither of them came. After a moment she acquiesced and they went with her, under guard, down corridors carved in rock onto catwalks made of metal, past workshops and bays full of plants growing in mineral solutions since the surface immediately beyond the mountain was so damn desolate. 

“How many people are there?” Vaako asked as they walked. 

“We’re just over a million,” she said, glancing at him in that same strange way before she picked up the pace and strode ahead, apparently deciding to trust him with that information at least; whether that meant they weren’t leaving that place or they were actually trusted was really fucking debatable but they watched her go, the guards behind them nudging them with the muzzles of their guns. 

“Who is she?” Riddick asked as he stepped up closer up to Vaako, his voice low. 

“Kat?” Vaako said, and made a sound of vague amusement. “She’s my sister. Ekaterina Vaako.”

Riddick’s eyes narrowed slightly behind his goggles. “You know she looks like she’s sixty, right?”

Kat glanced back over her shoulder with a smile at her lined face. “I turned seventy last month,” she said, then she gestured with her thumb to Vaako. “So did he, though he hardly looks it.” At least that answered the age-old age question, Riddick guessed.

They were led into a room at the end of the winding corridor, another one that was carved out of stone though all the furniture and fixtures inside were newer, metal or wood or stone from the surface, utilitarian. There were four others inside, various ages though the youngest couldn’t have been less than forty-five, even if Riddick’s ability to pick out ages had recently been off by a decade in at least one person’s case. 

“You’re a council member,” Vaako said. Kat nodded as she took her seat at the table. 

They asked them questions and Riddick resented it from the start, wondered what the fuck he’d let himself in for by going there but Vaako seemed right at home, or at least willing to answer anything and everything they asked. Nothing made sense but then pretty much everything did because it turned out Vaako was _Furyan_ , he’d been gone for thirty-seven years they said, since he’d made a deal with Lord Marshal Zhylaw. He told them what had happened, how he’d made the deal to spare what was left of the people left on Furya, how Zhylaw had vowed to leave their planet for last if they stopped resisting and allowed the Necromonger army to pull out and depart. After six years and over four million Furyan deaths, Zhylaw said he’d leave if Vaako and the five council members converted and went with him, and they’d wipe Furya from the maps. The others would be safe for decades.

“What happened to the others?” asked a councilman, tall and black, broad shoulders, with a two-handed sword there on the table. 

“Jacobson and James didn’t live past training,” Vaako said. “They were making trouble and so Zhylaw made sure they died. Leitman and Petrov were killed during an invasion. I believe Francis killed himself.”

“So you’re the last?”

“I’m the last.” 

“And why have you come back?”

Vaako held out a hand toward Riddick. “I brought him home.”

There was some deliberation, hushed tones around the council’s table as they stood there in the small, musty stone room, five minutes or more and Riddick found himself clenching his jaw almost painfully as he watched Vaako dig his nails into the palms of his hands till he broke the skin. For once, he didn’t stop him. Then the murmuring ceased and the council looked up at them. 

“You can stay,” Kat said. 

“Richard, we regret to say your family died some time ago,” said the tall man, scrolling through records on a flickering screen on the table top. “But we can offer you rooms in the fifth quarter and I’m sure there are people here who remember your parents.”

The guy looked fifty at most; Riddick was guessing he wasn’t one of the ones who’d known his parents unless thirteen-year-olds mixed with the adults on a regular basis. And he guessed _fifth quarter_ had to be some dumbass naming convention because even they didn’t look like fractions were that hard.

“Vaako,” another woman said, older, maybe Kat’s age, long hair braided over her shoulder. “Thank you for bringing Richard home. By all means, go with your sister.”

Riddick bristled, and not just at the use of his first name. “He stays with me,” he said. 

“But--” the second woman said. 

“He _stays with me_.” 

Vaako stepped in closer till they were shoulder to shoulder. “I stay with him,” he said. 

And apparently that was that.

***

The evening was awkward, people stopping by the small stone room that still wasn’t quite a cell but was pretty damn far from a home, people who’d known Vaako once upon a time and Riddick lay there on the bed sighing like a jackass with each new knock on the door. Vaako was cordial but kept each of the twelve visits as brief as he could and Riddick listened; he found out more about the guy in twelve visits from strangers on a planet he’d not seen since birth and couldn’t remember at all than he had in six goddamn months. 

The first thing he found out was he’d been a teacher. He’d taught armed and unarmed combat, which made sense, had usually had the senior class and three of his former students were the first three to visit, one of them now an instructor himself, the other two working in other areas, families of their own, each over fifty years old. 

Another was a childhood friend who tried to share stories that Vaako had clearly nearly forgotten, or at least wanted to. After that it was two teenage students with questions for class about the resistance against the Necromongers, and Vaako tried hard to answer without giving too much away. The next were an elderly couple and their son, daughter-in-law and their grandson, still sound of mind and pretty impressively sound of body for eighty years old, acquaintances who’d been there when the Necros had come, who’d fought with him. He was apparently some kind of goddamn hero for the things he’d done. 

And then the final knock of the day came and when Vaako opened the door he stepped back and took a long, deep breath. 

“Weren’t you coming to see me?” the woman asked, an athletic brunette around forty with an impressively angry expression on her face. “Don’t you know who I am?”

“I know who you are, Elle,” he said. “I just didn’t know what to say.”

It wasn’t a long conversation, not long at all before she turned and left after an awkward half-hug and then a slap and string of colourful curses as she swept out of the room and slammed the door behind her. Vaako rested his forehead down against the back of the door and sighed, took a breath then sighed again. 

“Elle?” Riddick asked. 

“Elena,” Vaako said, only glancing at him for a second before his forehead pressed to the door again, like he didn’t want to think about any of this at all and Riddick guessed he didn’t, hadn’t - the guy had been killing entire planets for nearly forty years and now here he was, home again, everyone trying to make nice with the goddamn Necro. “Elena Vaako. My daughter.”

After that the argument was inevitable, Riddick guessed, though it pretty much had been from the start. He asked him why he hadn’t told him any-fucking-thing about who he was and where he’d come from, why he’d told him shitty stories about lives he hadn’t had, pressed him up against the door by his shoulders and dug in so hard with the heels of his hands that Vaako winced at the bullet wound that would maybe take a while longer to heal. Vaako didn’t answer so he hit him, connected with that shoulder and then Vaako turned and hit him back like there weren’t still guards outside the door who’d come to see what was going on in there if they started to make a racket like this. Except they didn’t, not even when the lamp went over with a clatter and Riddick started to wonder if he’d got some sort of lifelong vendetta against light fixtures as they were plunged into darkness and okay so that wasn’t really fair on Vaako because it wasn’t like he’d developed the ability to see in the dark, but it wasn’t like he was going to turn down an advantage. 

Riddick pulled off his goggles and tossed them onto the bed. Vaako was getting better at fighting in the dark, inevitable since he’d been getting a hell of a lot of practice, not that it really helped all that much when Riddick could see perfectly and Vaako was relying entirely on his hearing, decent though it apparently was. Vaako landed a kick that took out Riddick’s knee but he was already pushing him down so that didn’t really mean a thing, just expedited matters so they wound up down on the stone floor with Vaako pressed there face-down, hands caught up above his head under Riddick’s. He probably could’ve gotten out of it but he didn’t even try and Riddick wasn’t totally sure if that was a good thing or not. Probably not. 

“So, why didn’t you tell me?” he asked again, leaning down by Vaako’s ear, the one that wasn’t currently pressed to the ground. He was leaning too damn hard on Vaako’s wrists but the bastard probably even liked that. 

“There’s a variety of reasons,” Vaako said, strained. “But in the end, you were desperate for a villain. So I gave you one.”

Riddick sighed and rested his head down against the back of Vaako’s neck, the collar there scraping at his brow. “They all think you’re a fucking hero.”

“They haven’t seen me for thirty-seven years.”

“So you’re saying you’ve changed.”

“I had to.”

“Why?”

“Everyone here would have died.”

“But you fuckers worship death,” Riddick said. “What’s so bad about dying?”

Vaako laughed, the sound tight and a fraction erratic. Riddick pushed down harder, kept him there right where he was, though it wasn’t like he was trying to escape. 

“I left to keep my daughter safe,” Vaako said. “I went with Zhylaw so she wouldn’t die.”

“And the god of death?”

“I _made_ myself believe.”

“ _Why_?” 

“So Zhylaw would trust me. So I could take his place.”

Riddick closed his eyes. He had to admit it made a kind of sense, twisted as that sense was. “And then you’d’ve conveniently forgotten all about Furya,” he said. 

Vaako nodded as best he could against the floor. Looked like the son of a bitch _was_ a hero.

Of course, Riddick didn’t give a damn about heroes. He didn’t give a damn about stories he’d heard throughout that evening, the nine kids they’d somehow managed to save when the lord marshal had ordered all the newborns killed, how only ten Furyans had made it off the planet free and alive and nine of them were under one whole year of age. Riddick had been one of them. None of the others had ever returned.

He didn’t give a damn about heroes so that wasn’t why he reached for the key hanging over his chest, had not a fucking thing to do with why he unlocked the collar around Vaako’s neck and pulled the damn thing off of him, tossed it away with a clang of metal on rock. And when he let Vaako turn under him, heroism really did have nothing to do with it; Vaako looked halfway between desolate and murderous and Riddick let him pull him in by the front of his shirt, let him wrap his hands around his neck. Maybe all that had kept Vaako from killing him in his sleep all those months ago, in all those months since, was a collar round his neck and Necromonger law. He’d wondered.

“I should kill you for keeping me chained,” Vaako said. 

“Is that the Necro or the Furyan speaking?”

Vaako scowled. “Both,” he said. 

But he didn’t squeeze any tighter. He pulled Riddick down instead, pulled him into a kiss that was hard and nearly fucking desperate and Riddick guessed he could understand that, guessed he could understand in a way why Vaako had never wanted to go back there when he’d killed so many people to keep so few alive. Vaako’s hands pushed at Riddick’s shirt so he leaned back to pull it off and then he knew what he was going to do, fucking stupid as it was. He unbuckled Vaako’s belt and yanked his pants down over his thighs, left them there around his knees, did the same with his own and Vaako let him do it. That damn grease was one of the only things that weren’t clothes that’d come with them from the ship and he used it, slicked Vaako’s dick as he stroked him to erection and that didn’t take long because the bastard was already halfway there. He sat back, pushed Vaako right up against his asshole, pushed him in, took a sharp breath as he did it and so did Vaako but really, who gave a fuck when they were screwing on the floor and Vaako’s nails raked over Riddick abdomen, made him growl as he leaned back and ground down against him. Vaako’s hand went around Riddick’s cock and stroked. It was a dumb fucking move but maybe just what they both needed. Maybe they’d needed anything but.

When they made it into bed sometime later, still half-dressed, Riddick wasn’t totally sure what the fuck they were doing. Maybe it was just that Vaako was the only familiar face on the planet; maybe it was just that Riddick was the only one there who’d known the Necromonger and not the Furyan. But either way they pushed the bunks together, metal scraping on the floor, and lay down together like they’d done before except the tangle of half-clothed limbs was something new that didn’t seem totally unwelcome to either.

Maybe Vaako wouldn’t sleep that night, but Riddick would. He was fucking exhausted.

***

He woke in the morning and Vaako wasn’t there. 

It was the first time in more than half a year that he’d woken without the son of a bitch somewhere within fifteen feet but he guessed that made sense since he’d taken off the damn collar. He didn’t have to stay so close now he wasn’t Riddick’s own personal, private prisoner. 

He washed quickly, put on fresh clothes, left the room and found a total lack of guards so he guessed someone in their wisdom had decided they weren’t needed; only problem was, that meant there was no one to ask where the fuck Vaako had gone to and no one to ask where the fuck he should look. He made his way back to the launch bay, ignoring stares and he guessed he knew why because Richard B Riddick was the only Furyan kid who’d made it back to Furya alive in thirty-seven years. They let him get into the ship but they’d stowed a power node somewhere else just in case, though that wasn’t what he’d come for at all; he picked up his blades, slung them over his back, and noted Vaako’s were already gone. Still, hell, at least he knew the ship was still there so chances were he was still somewhere on the planet, somewhere in the city under the mountain where apparently a million people lived. 

He wandered for maybe an hour, feeling better knowing he was armed, at least. The scale of the place was pretty impressive though Riddick guessed it had to be if there really were that many people there inside the mountains. There were monorails running here and there, people in seats that didn’t exactly look safety-conscious though he’d noticed, walking around, that there were no railings, no warning signs, no nothing in the whole damn place. Maybe that was just the way Furyans were, he thought, and that made sense since health and fucking safety had always made his blood boil more than strictly necessary. Maybe they really were his people, who knew. 

It turned out Ekaterina Vaako ran a small workshop. He stopped a guy in the street, guessing if she was on some sort of ruling council maybe people would know the name, and he was right - he even got directions out of it and three stops on the monorail, a ten minute walk through winding stone corridors into a wide, open square and there he was, walking into her workshop. She worked with metal, it seemed, since the store out front was full of jewellery and small bladed weapons right up to longswords in precious metals and alloys, pretty excellent work. He lifted a sword from a rack on the wall just as she came into the room, summoned by the sound of the bell rigged to the door that had rung as he’d entered, and she watched from behind the counter, long leather apron still in place, as he swung it, felt the heft of it. 

“Richard Riddick,” she said, with a faint smile that reminded him instantly of her brother. Her _twin_ brother, so at least part of Vaako’s previous tall tales had had some basis in reality. Who knew if any of the rest did.

“Most people just call me Riddick,” he said, and passed her the sword. “That’s nice work.”

“Thank you,” she said, turning to set the sword back in its place on the wall. “I know. But I suspect that’s not why you’re here.”

“I’m looking for your brother.”

“He’s probably gone to see Elle.” She took off her apron, folded it over the back of a chair. “She’s a teacher. History and combat, like her father.” She picked up a jacket and pulled it on. “I’m due a break. I’ll take you there.”

They took the monorail and sat together, watching the stone passages and halls and steep drops sweep by without the benefit of seat belts though it seemed to bother no one there around them. There was water there underground, a fast-flowing river that wound its way through the caverns, a waterfall set back from the tracks over a long, deep drop to the churning water below. He asked her questions and she answered, no hint of deception or hesitation as she spoke; the surface was habitable again these days but no one lived there, she said, because they’d made their home in this huge city in the hills even before the end of the war. They’d sometimes sent teams out to fish in the valley because most of the small underground lakes they had lacked wildlife, but they hadn’t had a functional ship to get them out there in years now as they’d needed the power nodes and various equipment to keep the city running in the early days after the Necromongers had left. There were forests out there, she said, past the desert and the ruined city. They’d sent scouting parties out on the eight-week round-trip hike to the nearest one, and there were animals and plants all living there. Maybe that was how they could use the new ship, she said, since growing meat substitutes hadn’t worked well in years. He didn’t object; he didn’t know if he was planning to stay or not but didn’t want to blow it right then and there. 

Then she asked him about Vaako and he showed her the courtesy of an honest response. She’d already guessed the worst of it, the invasions, how many planets there’d been, but he told her what he knew about him, the fact he’d risen in the ranks, been Zhylaw’s first amongst commanders. She already knew his own part in it, that he was still technically lord marshal of the Necromongers, so maybe she’d been working through the ship’s logs overnight because he sure as hell hadn’t told her. Maybe Vaako had, he thought, earlier than morning. Maybe she was just checking their stories for consistency. Either way, she apparently couldn’t’ve given a damn if he’d murdered half the universe as long as he was Furyan and back with them. Apparently, outside of the community, Furyans tended to do a lot of that. 

She was right: Vaako was in the training hall. It was another of those stone-carved caverns, something that’d started life as a mine then turned into something else, dotted with columns and the ceiling vaulted with metal arms bracing it up. There were areas dedicated to different age groups with rows of weapons and mats that at least partially cushioned the polished stone floor, and the room was _full_ of people. Seemed like combat was a big thing on Furya. 

“We had four halls in the city before the war that were all four times this size,” Kat told him as they walked. “We don’t need that many these days, but Simon worked in one of them. I think Elle chose this work to feel close to him.”

Riddick didn’t reply, and it didn’t seem like she expected him to. They just walked on through the hall, past the youngest classes, five or six years old with blunted wooden swords, past classes of juniors maybe fourteen or fifteen all practicing hand-to-hand, past a gun range full of energy weapons and Kat explained there was no shortage of fuel for those now that they’d reopened and extended the mines; unfortunately they’d cannibalised the ships to the extent that now, nearly forty years on, all the engineers who could’ve rebuilt them were dead or dying, which was a shame since they had the capacity for so many more. 

Kat was with the senior class, seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds all holding a knife in each hand. They were good, pretty damn impressive just from the few seconds as they approached, and Kat paused at the edge of their section. 

“It’s called _history and combat_ because the two have always gone hand-in-hand on Furya,” she said, looking at the class rather than at him. “We teach the children five hundred years of Furyan history through combat. The forms and the training mirror the struggles that the earliest settlers faced, and our evolution through the years.” 

Sounded like so much bullshit to him but he could kinda see the sense in it if he squinted and turned his head as he watched. It was turning out they were a hard people, strong and tough and pretty damn tenacious because Furya hadn’t been all that inviting in the beginning and frankly wasn’t even by that point, something about erratic orbits that Riddick understood but didn’t feel like exploring all that deeply. Kat said they’d adapted to the planet over the decades and centuries that followed, something about the radiation from the planet’s sun and the minerals in the soil that helped that along, made them change faster, into what they were when the Necros attacked. They’d kept them on the planet for six whole years, so many ships captured that if they’d nuked the planet from orbit they’d’ve decimated their entire fleet and maybe the next world with orbital weapons or a decent army would’ve finished them off and Necros would’ve been long gone. He guessed now he knew why Zhylaw had made the deal; they’d left Furya alive so the Necromongers could go on, too. The two armies would’ve killed each other. 

They watched from the edges. The blades weren’t blunted at all in the senior class, they were edged but apparently the class was used to cuts and bruises because that’s what they’d come to expect through their entire lives. There was their teacher at the centre, Elle telling a story in a voice loud enough to carry, about the day the Necromongers left their world. She sounded bitter, likely was, because her father was in the story, her father who was standing there at the opposite side of the mats, opposite Riddick but he hadn’t even seen he was there. He guessed he couldn’t blame him, or could be it would’ve been pretty goddamn petty.

“He was a teacher, like you are?” asked one of the students, which seemed a damn fool question because she’d just said he was. Apparently _good with a blade_ didn’t equal _quick-witted_.

“Ask him yourself,” she said, gesturing off to where Vaako was standing. He came in closer, to the edge of the mats. 

“I was,” he said. 

“Then you were a Necromonger?”

He nodded sharply. “I still am.”

The students looked impressed by this; Elle, on the other hand, didn’t. 

“Can you still fight?” asked another student, a tall one, male, holding knives as long as his forearms. He looked a hell of a lot like he wanted to fight him himself, though Riddick suspected he’d’ve knocked the kid right down on his ass as quick as blinking.

“Yes.” 

“Can we see?”

Elle laughed a bitter little laugh. “Why don’t we,” she said. “Clear the floor.” 

Riddick understood what she meant just as clearly as Vaako must have as she motioned for the students to leave, the lot of them moving obediently to the benches that lined two full sides of the mats. Vaako pulled off his boots and socks, pulled off his jacket and stepped onto the mats; Elle stretched, circled her neck and drew two long, straight blades from sheaths tied over her thighs. 

“I made those,” Kat said, apparently unperturbed by the scene unfolding before them, maybe a little amused by it. Riddick snorted, half sure he was starting to like her despite himself. 

Vaako pulled his curved blades from their sheath at his back and stepped forward. 

“I had those made for him,” Riddick said, watching Kat eye the blades, so he pulled out one of his own and she took it, admiring the workmanship. 

“I guess Necros are good for one thing, at least,” she said, with a glint in her eye as she handed it back. He smiled and had to force it away.

It was a hell of a fight, Riddick had to admit. Kat talked through the whole thing, telling him how _all_ Furyan children were trained to the age of 18, that most kept up a degree of training after that, some went into security and so had specific training in that direction, but there were few who actually went on to teach; at that particular moment there were fourteen fully-trained history masters in the whole city. There’d used to be forty, when they’d had a greater need for them. 

It was a hell of a fight, Elle with her long, straight blades and Vaako with his curved ones. Riddick thought maybe it’d be tame, that Vaako would let her win just because hell, she was his daughter and as far as Riddick knew he only had one of them, but they really went for it and maybe that was a Furyan trait, too. The class of maybe thirty students sat there in silence as they watched, a couple of the lower classes peeling off from whatever they were doing with staffs or knives or those blunt-edged swords to peer over to see, too. The way they moved was pretty damn hypnotic, a flowing style Riddick recognised without really knowing how except sometimes he moved that way, too, fluid, fluent, the blades like an extension of himself. Vaako was bigger and heavier and bulkier but that didn’t necessarily mean he had an advantage because Elle was quick, _really_ quick, darting around him, slashing in that strange, familiar, graceful ebb and flow, perfect technique that Riddick had never seen Vaako use before; they caught each other at the exact same time, blades just barely grazing skin over forearms, just barely raising blood, and apparently that was the aim: first blood. 

They stopped, gave what was apparently a customary nod, and stood down as the assembled classes gave a round of impressed applause. Apparently they didn’t get to see this often. Apparently, Kat said, the masters tended not to fight for show, maybe once or twice a year. They’d all had to kill to get their status, she said; they fought their nearest rival for the position when the time came and they fought to the death.

It was _then_ that Vaako saw him, as Elle left the mats and left him standing there. He paused for a moment, like he wasn’t sure if he should follow her or leave or something else, and then instead he gestured to Riddick, beckoned, waved him over with his blades still in his hands. 

“This should be a sight,” Kat said, as Elle came over to join her; Elle looked back over at the mats and sighed. 

“You should go,” she said. “We’d all like to see what you can do.” And frankly, for no reason at all that he could find, Riddick wanted to show them. 

He pulled off his boots and socks and left them there haphazardly, his own petty rebellion against the ordered rows of footwear there underneath the benches where the students sat. Then he pulled his blades from the sheath at his back and he stepped onto the mats where Vaako was waiting, strode over to him. Maybe showing them what he’d got wasn’t the only thing he wanted out of this, he thought, as Vaako clenched his fists around his matching blades. Maybe he wanted to show Vaako, too.

 _Their_ fight was something else. There was technique to it, sure, but that wasn’t what either of them was going for, at least not after the first few seconds when Riddick lunged in and came close to nicking Vaako’s neck. Vaako’s jaw clenched as he moved away, as he nodded an acknowledgement that yes, they could go that way, they could go for it, really _go for it_ and to hell with form and technique and sportsmanship, if that was how Riddick wanted it to play. Vaako clashed his blades together, scraped the sharp metal edges one against the other as he smiled tensely. Riddick shook out his arms and they started to circle. 

It wasn’t over quickly, nowhere near as Vaako’s fight with Elle had been, and it wasn’t graceful, nowhere close. Vaako’s elbow connected with Riddick’s jaw, Riddick pulled him down and they weren’t even trying to cut each other, not really, as they spun away. Vaako skidded to his knees and Riddick went after him, a slice in air that narrowly missed as Vaako dipped his head back, slashed out with one hand and Riddick could feel the shift of air against his arm. Riddick bounded off a wall and Vaako brought him down heavily, winded him though he pushed himself away as the blade went straight into the mat behind him, spilling its fibrous stuffing. Riddick laughed, Vaako did something close to smirking, and they went back in again. He was pretty sure this was nothing like the masters taught Furyan children, or ever had. 

Vaako lost one of his blades, used the other to hook one of Riddick’s away so they were even again and that meant nothing good for the fight once they each had a fist free. Riddick caught Vaako on the jaw, Vaako’s knuckles connected with the goggle lens over Riddick left eye and they went on, bruised, getting closer to breathless as they moved around the mats, as they strayed off them on occasion, as Vaako’s knee hit the wall and then Riddick’s fist did too and they ran back onto the mats, vaulted a bench, whirled as Vaako’s blade narrowly missed Riddick’s Adam’s apple and then they were on the ground, Riddick on top of him, knee planted either side of Vaako’s hips, each of them with a hand tight at each other’s throat, each with a razor-sharp blade right there over each other’s carotid. 

They were breathing heavy, Vaako’s eyes dark, Riddick’s skin flushed, a draw in all but that final step. Vaako turned his head and Riddick loosened his grip to let him do it, watched him as everyone else watched them both until Vaako leaned up and pressed his neck against Riddick’s blade. He fetched blood himself, and then the fight was over. Vaako had let him win, not that it meant anything. Or maybe it did, but that wasn’t worth considering.

“That’s not exactly what we teach,” Kat said as they moved off the mats and let the students return, surprised applause dying down though the lot of them were still eyeing Riddick and Vaako. Kat turned up Vaako’s chin and eyed the shallow cut; he let her do it, her fingers at his chin, like they’d done it a hundred times before and maybe once upon a time they had. Maybe that was where all his scars had come from, from fights in arenas just like this before the city fell.

“But it seems effective,” Elle noted. She looked at Riddick as he pulled on socks and boots. “You’re very good.”

Riddick gestured at Vaako with a jut of his chin. “So is he,” he said. 

Elle glanced at Vaako; Vaako looked at her. “You should come to dinner,” she said, a hard twist to her mouth like it pained her to say it. “Both of you.” Her gaze went to Kat. “All three of you.” 

And then she went back to her class, without waiting for an answer. Riddick guessed it was a pretty foregone conclusion anyway; Vaako would be going and fuck it, he guessed that meant he was going, too.

***

Elena Vaako had two kids, her daughter twenty and her son twenty-two, neither of them as angry as she appeared to be. She wasn’t married, both kids had different fathers, but Furyans didn’t seem to give a damn about that kind of thing. 

The daughter, confusingly also Ekaterina but this one called _Katya_ for short, already had a daughter of her own about two years old. Riddick nudged Vaako in the ribs with his elbow when they found this out and said something about that making him a great-grandfather. He didn’t look impressed, even less so at the fact that everyone there was eating but him. That particular part of the purification still hadn’t worn off, maybe never would, and it made all of the others uncomfortable to some degree; Riddick guessed no one had thought about the fact that one of their guests didn’t actually eat, though personally he couldn’t’ve given any less of a damn about it.

Kat did most of the talking, along with Katya who was apparently pretty interested to meet her long-lost grandfather. Elle prodded at her food across the table from Riddick and Riddick himself wound up talking to Simon - named for his grandfather - who was training as an engineer but fought pretty often in his spare time. It seemed they had a pretty active fight scene, a hall set aside for it where over-eighteens basically drew names out of a hat for an opponent if they wanted to fight. Kat said it was a kind of Furyan relief valve, where the ones who were that way inclined could let off steam, a tradition they’d had since the earliest days. Riddick could see the sense in that since so many of them seemed to run so pretty fucking hot, himself included. 

“I’m glad you came home,” Elle told Vaako, strained and awkward as they left maybe ninety minutes later, and Riddick stepped outside into the stone-cut corridor to wait for him, pretending not to hear. “We have a spare room. If you want to stay with us.” 

There was a pause, and Riddick wondered for a moment if Vaako was going to accept. After all, it wasn’t like he had any family anywhere else in the verse unless you counted Dame Vaako back out there with the Necro fleet and Riddick still had pretty much no idea if she’d ever really counted. Necro marriage made no sense.

“Thanks,” Vaako said, “but I’ve got somewhere to stay.” Riddick frowned at himself, clenched and unclenched his fists as he stood there against the carved stone wall, the name _E. Vaako_ carved by the door. It shouldn’t’ve been a relief to hear him say that and he fucking hated that it was. He was turning into just the kind of simple jackass he’d always loathed.

They said goodnight. Kat, still inside, mentioned maybe Vaako would like to go back to work as a teacher and Elle made some kind of vague noise of agreement but Vaako just said he’d think about it and then exited the house with a brief glance at Riddick, his expression totally unreadable. Then they started the walk back to their not-quite-cell, leaving Vaako’s family where they were. 

It might’ve been more time-efficient to take the monorail that apparently ran at all hours of the day and night, not that there was much in the way of natural light under a goddamn mountain and in some ways it was kinda like he’d traded one perpetual daytime for another, except this one was warmer at least and arguably no one wanted to kill him and take his place. They didn’t take the monorail, however, just wound their way down the corridors and down the tracks by open caverns, past the waterfall he’d seen once before on the way to Kat’s workshop. There were kids there, maybe five or six of them about fifteen or sixteen years old, jostling each other and laughing like they were joking about jumping off of it. They moved on when they saw the two of them coming, hopping onto the monorail when it next came by, and Riddick stopped to peer off of the edge when they got to it. It was a _long_ way down to the water below that churned pretty efficiently in the downpour from the waterfall, then trailed into the rushing river that wound its way all through the caverns the Furyans lived in. Vaako paused with him, looking down. 

“Does anyone jump?” Riddick asked. 

“You mean for suicide or for fun?”

Riddick chuckled. “Can’t see these people killing themselves,” he said, amused though he found he really did mean that. “Fun.”

Vaako looked at him for a moment and that same damn unreadable expression was still there on his face, but he nodded and then looked away. “Yes, people jump,” he said. “We always called it the Leap. It’s fifty-fifty, more or less, whether you survive the jump or die trying, but--”

“But that doesn’t stop Furyans, right?” Vaako’s mouth twisted into something like a smile that told him all he needed to know about that particular point. “So, when did _you_ do it?”

The almost-smile changed, spread into something actually discernible as a real smile for a second before Vaako took a breath and sighed it out, still looking out over the drop into the water and the smile was gone. “I was nineteen,” he said. “I jumped with my fiancée.”

“You both made it out alive?”

“We were married six days later.”

Vaako turned away and started walking again, heading down the path away from the falls and so Riddick went along, away from the roaring water, down the side of the monorail tracks. “There a reason you jumped six days before your wedding?” Riddick asked. “Cold feet?”

Vaako gave him a withering glance for a second, pushing his hands into his pants pockets as he walked. “There’s a legend,” he said. “You take the leap with a group of friends and you’ll be friends forever. You take it with _one_ person and you know… well, you _know_.”

Riddick stopped. Vaako took another couple of steps then he stopped, too, turned back to him, taking his hands back out of his pockets and putting them up on his hips instead. 

“She died when the Necros came, right?” Riddick asked. 

“She commanded ground troops. She died in the fourth year, when Elena was two years old.” 

“I bet Zhylaw told you you’d see her again in the underverse, right?” Riddick said. 

Vaako nodded. “We gave up God here centuries before I was born. No church, no prayer, no afterlife; on Furya we believe this life is all there is. Then the lord marshal said I’d see her again.” 

“Do you believe that?”

“I don’t know what I believe.”

“You always sounded so fucking sure.”

“I was.”

Riddick paused, cracking his fingers to cover the relative silence, if you could call the perpetual hum of the monorail track or the roar of the waterfall and the river down below _silence_. He glanced back over his shoulder at the falls, then turned to Vaako. 

“If this is some quintessential fucking Furyan experience, we should do it,” he said. 

Vaako raised his brows. “Only five percent of Furyans ever jump,” he said. “Can you call that _quintessential_?”

Riddick shrugged expansively, but he’d already turned back to the waterfall, was already eyeing the jumping point, and somehow Vaako sounded more fucking animated than he had in days. 

“I’m going over, with or without you,” Riddick said, looking back over his shoulder. 

Vaako was almost-smiling again, shaking his head, and when Riddick started his run Vaako ran too. Riddick was over the edge first, Vaako just a couple of feet behind him, and the drop was fucking huge, fucking _huge_ , they went down deep into the freezing water and Riddick could see why there was a 50% chance of fucking it up and winding up dead because there were rocks down there in the water that he hadn’t seen from above, jagged ones, a couple of metres off course and he’d’ve done himself some damage. Not only that but the current was fucking insane, tugging at him, swirling around the rocks and trying to pull him down so he kicked off of one of those rocks, kicked up, kicked toward what he hoped like hell was the surface because pretty soon his lungs were burning and he came up with a gasp, thankful his damn goggles fit so tightly or they’d’ve been gone, never to be seen again. Of course, of fucking _course_ , Vaako was already up there treading water. 

“What took you so long?” Vaako said, actually teasing, then set off for a ledge at the side of the falls where he pulled himself up and offered Riddick a hand. He took it, let Vaako pull him up and then followed, dripping, as Vaako led the way in behind the falls like all of this was still so familiar over fifty years since his first jump. There was a cave back there, surprisingly light through the water though that wouldn’t’ve mattered for Riddick at least, the top edge just high enough by a couple of inches for the two of them to stand up straight. There were names on the wall, carved into the hard black stone, and Riddick looked them over as he dripped quite impressively from his soaked-through clothing. 

“Where are you?” he asked, and Vaako joined him, pointed out the third _S. Vaako_ Riddick had seen, right above a _J. Rinaldi_ who may or may not’ve been his wife. Riddick didn’t feel like asking so he pushed him up against the wall instead, leaned in close as they both dripped on the floor, and Vaako’s hands went to Riddick’s hips to pull him in tighter, closer. It’d been a fucking rush, the jump, and he was still pumped with it when he turned his head and pressed a hot, sucking kiss under Vaako’s jaw, then over one scar at the side of his neck, then up to his mouth and Vaako returned the kiss like Riddick wasn’t the only one who was nearly fucking shaking with adrenaline. Vaako’s hands shifted, one going up to the back of Riddick’s head over the strap of his goggles, one going down to the curve of his ass to haul him in as tight together as they could get, and then they were on the fucking _floor_ , both kneeling, pulling at each other’s wet clothes and Riddick was dimly aware that one of Vaako’s blades was gone and somehow the leather wrap had come away from one of his own and he couldn’t’ve given less of a fuck if he’d tried because then Vaako shoved Riddick’s pants down to his knees and pushed him back, the angle all wrong because he was still kneeling as he went back, his back arched, hands propping him up against the stone floor, so Vaako could take him into his mouth. 

He let him do it for maybe thirty seconds, maybe a minute, who the fuck knew, then he pushed him back and pushed him down, shoved down Vaako’s pants the way he’d dealt with his and hopped on top of him, knees spread either side of Vaako’s shoulders as he leant down to suck hard at Vaako’s cock. Vaako got the hint, pulled Riddick’s hips down so he could suck him too, fingers teasing over his ass and between his cheeks to toy with the muscle between them. It didn’t take long, sucking like that, on a hard fucking floor, pumped full of adrenaline, for the two of them to come one after the other like a goddamn cascade reaction and then Riddick turned off to the side, went down hard on his back as he wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, then on the wet shirt he’d discarded. Turned out it was Vaako’s wet shirt but he was pretty sure neither of them gave a damn about that for the time being. 

It was cold as hell in there so they sat together after, once they’d pulled up soaked-through pants and pulled on soaked-through shirts and jackets. Vaako cursed under his breath when he realised he’d lost a blade but Riddick guessed they hadn’t exactly been thinking precautions against loss when they’d jumped or they wouldn’t’ve jumped at all. They sat together while Riddick carved his name on the wall; some enterprising soul had left a laser torch in there and the last few jumpers had used it but Riddick being Riddick he did it the old-fashioned way with one of his blades, scratching _R. Riddick_ into the stone in short, sharp strokes. He’d seen two other Riddicks there, high up in the list. He didn’t feel like asking about them and maybe never would. 

Then they left, followed the path around behind the waterfall and climbed up the almost too-steep stone wall back up to the path by the monorail. Twenty minutes later, they’d toweled off and stretched out in bed. 

Furya was a hell of a place. He wished he’d felt at home there.

***

Vaako was gone in the morning. Again. Maybe he shouldn’t’ve been surprised but it was still pretty damn odd even if he knew Vaako didn’t sleep, so maybe the oddest thing was the fact he went to bed each night in the first place. 

There was a kind of marketplace in each quarter of the city and apparently the idea of a fifth one did make sense, a new one they’d been constructing as their numbers increased. The marketplaces were huge open squares with plants and fruits that didn’t have a price to them because it’d been nearly forty years since Furya had had a currency that wasn’t trade and even then that applied only to luxuries like the weapons in Kat’s workshop. Food was free, even the cooked food from the stalls set up toward the centre around tables like an army mess, and Riddick grabbed a bowl of what looked like it might’ve been porridge and it turned out it tasted like it, too. He’d thought Vaako had been pretty lucky back with the fleet that he didn’t have to eat but some of the smells around the marketplace made him wonder if there on Furya it wasn’t a crying shame that he’d been purified. The irony was it was all grown the same way as the Necromongers had done it, but he guessed taste got more important if you actually had to eat what you grew. 

“You have any meat?” he asked one of the cooks as he returned his bowl for cleaning. 

“We’ve not had meat since I was a seven years old,” the woman told him, with a rueful little smile. “You might’ve noticed there’s no room down here for us to keep livestock. Not that I think we ever did.”

He guessed she was right - under a mountain wasn’t exactly the right place for a herd of cows or a flock of sheep and who the fuck knew what they’d feed them even if they could keep them. It looked like the teams of botanists had a pretty full-on job keeping just the people fed.

Kat’s workshop was his next stop and he found her there with Katya who was apparently her apprentice, something about skills not necessarily being handed down in families but more often than not it turned out that way for at least one generation or another. She let him into the back rooms that time, past the counter and into the place where they lit fires and hammered metal and he guessed he could see how Furya had kept people strong if there were women who’d hit seventy still beating out swords on anvils. 

“Can you make a new one of these?” he asked her, once he’d taken the sheath with his blades in it down from his back. 

“Well, of _course_ I can,” she told him, with a dramatic sigh and a shake of her head and Katya grinned from across the room, over the dagger she was polishing. “You want me to rewrap this hilt, too, or don’t you think I’m capable of that either?”

Riddick chuckled and Katya ducked her head; Kat had a smile playing at her lips as she took the sheath and blades without an answer and set them on her workbench, then hunted around in a drawer a few metres behind her. She came back with a pair of long knives in leather sheaths that should slip onto a belt and tie around the thigh, just like her own and many others like them Riddick had seen around the city, and passed them over. 

“Take these till I’m done,” she said. “And try not to lose them.”

He unbuckled his belt and added the knives to it, secured them as the two women didn’t even pretend not to watch him do it, and Riddick narrowed his eyes as he looked back up at Kat. “They were his,” he said, something about the aged grain of the leather, the wear in the handles, the fact the blades had been hand-sharpened more than once or twice, something about the way the two of them were looking at him. 

“Our father’s, actually,” Kat said. “But you were close, I’ll give you that.” 

“You know I can’t pay you, right?”

Kat smiled. There was something not quite sinister about it but exactly like she had a plan. He was starting to think the Vaakos were notorious for plans.

“I have an idea about that,” she said. “I want you to take me somewhere.”

Of course, Kat knew where they were keeping the ship’s missing power node; it was actually in a trunk in the corner of her living room, wrapped in a blanket that looked like it’d been in the family for three hundred years and maybe it had. They took it and hopped on the monorail out to the launch bay where several armed guards tried to shoo them away but Kat was firmer than that and, as it happened, actually had the authority to back it up. Apparently she wasn’t worried that he’d kill her and take off and Riddick guessed she had pretty good reason for that: he hadn’t waited thirty-seven years to come back to Furya and then fuck off again immediately or without cause, even if it did feel at least faintly like he was being held against his will. 

They flew back out the way he’d come in with Vaako a few days before and down the valley toward what Kat said had once been a city of millions. He wasn’t totally sure how she could tell where the hell they were going but she directed him by sight out of the front screen and they landed in a wide street, kicking up dust with the engines. She led the way once the ramp was down, down the main road and into a side street, into a building that was somehow still standing. She said the Necros had made sure they couldn’t return to the city for at least twenty years, some kind of chemical weapon, and once twenty years had passed they hadn’t had the ships to get down there anymore, definitely not to bring anything back. It was a three-day hike through the valley’s rocky terrain to the outskirts of the city and she admitted, in a somewhat conspiratorial tone, that she maybe couldn’t climb the way she’d used to. 

The people in the city had lived in families, she said, as they walked into the house. She’d lived with her parents and her grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins, he elder brother and her twin brother and his wife, until the war. After the first year, most of the family was gone. After the second, it was just her and Vaako and his wife and daughter, three cousins who were gone after year three. They’d been a military family, father a commander, elder brother a commander after him, and their brother had been the first to die. They hadn’t talked about him much after that. 

They’d gone to the mountains after the first few months, some of them into the old mining camps inside, some of them out in the valley. The metals in the hills kept the Necros’ sensors from picking them up with any accuracy and they’d managed to hide there pretty successfully, managed to launch assaults of their own and kept the bulk of the fleet down on the planet, just outside the far side of the city. She showed him around the house, the whole place like they’d just left it as was, toys in the kids’ nurseries, dishes on tables, clothes in drawers or hung out on lines to dry. She showed him her brother’s room, the one he’d shared with his wife; there were no photographs because that had never been the Furyan way of things, she said, but there was a coat still on the back of the door in a woman’s size, boots in the bottom of the wardrobe. She’d been tall, he guessed from the clothes. He could make more guesses from the long dark hairs in the abandoned hairbrush, from the guns on the wall that Kat said were hers, from the uniform jacket still on a hanger over the mirror. 

“She was a good woman,” Kat said with a solemn nod, then led him back out of the room. Riddick paused a second to grab a leather jacket from a chair by the dresser that looked like it was probably Vaako’s and then followed her on. He could take him something to remind him of the life he’d led before, at least, and see what kind of effect it had.

Kat had never married. She’d always thought she’d have time, she said, then the war had begun and after that they were busy, she was banging out new weapons day and night, and then afterwards she’d had Elle to raise and the city to run. She’d been elected to the council after the Necros left, she said, and said it was probably because of who her brother was and what he’d done but Riddick somehow doubted that. She was pretty commanding herself, not just from a commanding family.

What she’d come out there for was a set of tools she said had belonged to her mother who’d taught her her trade in the workshop behind the house, tools that’d help with the job he’d asked her to do. But after that they wandered for a while through the streets and she talked, told him what those ruined buildings had been, told him that place over there with the roof half caved in was where she and Vaako had gone to school, that hall over there was where he’d learned to fight and then taught others after that. She remembered the day he’d been promoted to master, the man he’d had to kill to get there, a friend of his, and how death was always a part of Furyan culture but never _needless_ death. They’d found ways to channel their strength. They’d had five hundred years of experience, after all, as one of the very first human colonies in the verse. 

They went back just as the sun was starting to set over the river out in the distance, took off and hovered there for a moment as Riddick looked over the city and out beyond it, got higher so he could see the edges of the forest on the far bank, miles away but the ship’s sensors told him what it was. It stretched for miles, thick and deep, and Kat told him about the time their father had taken his three kids out there to see the animals. There were huge things in there, she said, with all the awe of the six-year-old she’d been at the time, things like tigers with teeth as long as the knives they both wore. Her father and a colleague of his had killed one with the knives that Riddick was wearing and they’d roasted it on a huge spit over a fire by the river on their way back home. 

“How about I go in there and bring one out for dinner,” Riddick said. 

Kat laughed. “Sure,” she said. “Go ahead.” And maybe she didn’t think he meant it but three minutes of fast drive skimming the planet surface in a ship meant to travel almost faster than light and they touched down by the forest edge. She let him go as the sun set behind the trees and he took off his goggles, showed her the shine on his eyes as he drew his borrowed knives. An hour later, maybe two, scratched by the branches of the thick, dense trees, bloodied but the blood clearly wasn’t his own, he came back out with a beast almost his own size slung across his shoulders. Kat was suitably impressed. 

“I think we might have found a job for you,” she said. 

***

It was a hell of a meal that night, a community event where Kat and Elle’s neighbours all came into the small square between their homes and they made a fire in the pit in the centre like they apparently did in the winter for warmth. Riddick butchered the animal, whatever the fuck they called the species, on a table nearby, kids gathered round to stare because they’d never seen anything like it before. It took a good hour to get it all done, to skin it, cut it down to steaks, and the ones who remembered meat cooked it all over the coals on a grill Ellie’s son Simon set up over the pit and then served out generous helpings on metal plates. Riddick was bloody to his elbows by the end of it, still was while he ate, the meat full of flavour brought out by the salts and herbs Kat and her assembled team of cooks had rubbed it all with. By the end of the night, they’d fed nearly a hundred people and still had plenty of leftovers. And all the time, Vaako hung back by Kat’s front door. 

Once he could sensibly steal away without much notice, Riddick went and took Vaako with him, back to the room they were sharing and a door they could lock between the two of them and the rest of the city. Vaako frowned at the state of him, undressed him, pulled him into the shower in the tiny bathroom and Riddick let him wash him off with a cloth under the water, finding all the spots that were still covered in blood and watching it sluice away down the drain. He had to admit the sewerage system was pretty damn efficient for a set of caves, not that he really wanted to dwell on that thought. 

“I had a feeling you’d find a way to kill things,” Vaako said, his humour at least somewhat better once the blood was gone, though his hands slipped up over Riddick’s chest to rest around his throat. The way his thumbs pressed over his trachea was almost affectionate though he guessed it might bruise and so affection seemed relative. “They’ll want you to do it again. They’ll expect us both to work.”

“I already said I will.” Vaako nodded; Riddick leaned back against the polished stone wall, his own thumbs tracing Vaako’s hipbones. “You’re gonna teach?”

Vaako killed the shower. “I’ve been asked to lead the advanced class,” he said. “I can’t say no.” He stepped out, tossed Riddick a towel. 

“You _want_ to say no?”

Vaako shrugged noncommittally. Riddick didn’t have the energy left to push it. 

He was gone in the morning, which was starting to wear thin. 

Riddick took Kat and Simon and two of Simon’s fighting buddies and they went out to the forest. It was the farthest the three twenty-somethings had ever been from the mountain and Kat had to remind them three or four times over that this wasn’t a game, but in the end it turned out the three of them weren’t bad once things got serious. They came back out with a huge carcass each, five hours later, the three kids looking proud though they’d taken a fucking age and more coaching than Riddick’s patience usually had the time for, not to mention a crash-course in how to use a crossbow so they didn’t need to get up close like he had. Maybe next time, he’d told them. Still, four animals that size would be meat for hundreds across the city, thousands if they stretched it out in stews the way Kat said they would. She seemed to know what she was doing.

He left the butchery to someone else and went back to the room with a ration of fruit instead, munching on something like an apple when he went inside and Vaako was there, reading at the small table. The jacket Riddick had brought back from the city was lying on the table top.

“You went to my house,” Vaako said. 

“Kat asked me to take her.” 

“You were in my room.”

“Kat showed me around.” 

“She gave you our father’s knives.”

“They’re on loan.”

Vaako sighed. “You know what she’s planning.”

Riddick shrugged as he pulled out a chair and took a seat. “She might’ve mentioned it, yeah.”

Vaako put down his book, a marker in the page that turned out to be a tiny knife. “What did you tell her?”

“What do you think I told her?”

“I don’t know, Riddick, that’s why I asked.”

Riddick brought his head down dramatically against the metal table then banged one fist against it with a groan. “I told her I couldn’t fuck your daughter and I couldn’t fuck your granddaughter,” he said. “What the fuck do you _think_ I said.”

“They’d be a good match, especially Elena. Katya’s young for you.”

Riddick glanced up. “Do you _want_ me to?”

Vaako paused, frowned, narrowed his eyes just for a moment. “No, I don’t,” he said. 

He didn’t ask if that was because he didn’t approve of Riddick fucking his relatives in some kind of weird-ass arranged maybe-marriage or something else entirely. What he did was stand and round the table in a second flat and kiss him, hauling him bodily to his feet, both hands taking a fistful of the back of Vaako’s shirt as he did so. When Vaako kissed him back, all teeth and tongue and fucking ardour, that was all the response he would’ve needed if he’d asked the question anyway. Maybe it was a tacit agreement but it was an agreement nonetheless, consensus when Vaako pushed him down face-first on the mattress and fucked him with hastily slicked fingers, hard and deep with his free hand pressed to the back of his neck, till Riddick was tingling throughout and pushing back with each thrust. Then Vaako was in him, harder and deeper, Riddick pushing up onto his hands and knees, Vaako’s hands at his waist then skimming over his belly till one was around his balls and the other stroking him just the way he knew he liked. It was a hell of a response. The couldn’t communicate for shit but some things they did well.

“She trying to set you up too?” Riddick asked, after, once they’d sponged down the worst of the post-coital mess. Vaako turned onto his side and propped his head on one hand, the palm of the other skimming over one of Riddick’s nipples then the other and then pressing hard over his sternum, over his heart. 

“I told her purification makes Necromongers sterile,” he said. 

“And that’s true?”

Vaako raised his brows then leaned over, bit sharply at Riddick’s closest nipple and made him laugh which was maybe the intention, maybe not. 

“Most of the time,” he said. “I couldn’t father another child if I wanted to.” 

“Then I guess you’re off the hook.”

Riddick reached over to the nightstand and flicked off the light, pulled off his goggles then turned back in and dumped Vaako onto his front. Vaako let him do it, lying there as Riddick pressed the heel of his hand down the line of Vaako’s spine. 

“You know I can’t stay,” Vaako said. “I haven’t belonged here for a long time.”

Riddick shifted closer, bit down lightly at Vaako’s shoulder, fingers at one scar on one side of Vaako’s neck. 

He didn’t say he knew, because fuck knew if he even belonged there himself, if there was anywhere in the whole goddamn verse that he belonged. “We’ve got a couple of weeks to decide, right?” he said instead. 

Vaako didn’t answer; he’d already made up his mind. Riddick guessed all that was left was to make up his own.

***

The idea came the following day, after breakfast, while Vaako was teaching. 

Riddick went down to Kat’s workshop before the trip out to the forest started for the day, the ship as laden with potential new hunters as it could be since apparently the council had taken up the hunting trips as some kind of brilliant new Furyan policy where everyone would eat meat at least once every week. Kat said she needed new raw materials and so she left Katya to man the store and took Riddick with her instead, down into the mines below the city, a trip on the monorail then an elevator that seemed to go down for-fucking-ever through solid rock. It was somehow even colder down there though that didn’t make sense according to what Riddick knew about mines and physics, and there was a kind of order window up at the entrance that Kat approached with a basket on her arm. 

She placed an order then handed over the basket that was apparently full of cooked, seasoned meats. Twenty minutes’ wait later, the guy at the window handed over a leather bag and Riddick took it with a grimace at the weight of it; apparently it was full of precious metals and the strap dug in at his shoulder but what the fuck, he was getting something for nothing or at least for very little. Once they got back to the workshop, Kat handed over his blades with the rewrapped hilt and one new one to replace the one Vaako had lost in the water. He slung his sheath up over his back and passed her back her father’s knives. 

“So, he lost a blade in the river,” she said, almost conversationally but that mischievous glint was in her eye again. 

“Careless, I know,” he replied, carefully, noncommittally.

“I hear you jumped.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“You jumped with Simon.”

“If you mean your brother and not your niece’s son then yeah, I did.”

“You know the story about jumping?”

“Yeah, he told me.”

Kat chuckled and Katya tried very hard to look like she wasn’t listening in at all. “Then I suppose I understand why I couldn’t persuade you for Elle or Katya,” she said, and Katya ducked her head to hide her amused smile as Kat looked him up and down. “You could have told me, Richard. We’re not prudish here.”

He clenched his jaw, not sure if he was just as amused as Katya or pissed the hell off by the whole thing because there was no way in hell he’d ever envisaged talking to Vaako’s sister about their sex life. Worse than that, she’d practically paired them off in a neat little box like it was some kind of perfectly legitimate relationship and not whatever the fuck it was, usually violent, non-communicative, stubborn and stupid like the two of them usually were, either individually or as a pair. 

Then she opened the bag. 

“Well, this isn’t what I ordered,” she said. “Katya, correct me if I’m wrong but we haven’t branched out into missile manufacture while I was sleeping, have we?”

Katya gave her a roll of her eyes as Kat turned over one of the heavy boxes in her hands. “Richard, could you take this back and get them to send me the silver I ordered?”

So he went, because he had the time and because he was strangely intrigued. He trailed back down the elevator into the mines, had an interesting conversation with the guys at the window about the kinds of things they were mining down there, about what they found in the long tunnels that branched out from under the city and into the surrounding hills. There were hundreds of miles of tunnels down there, they said, all kinds of metals and stones and minerals that they mined and yeah, some of those materials went to labs where they produced weapons they planned to use for that inevitable day when the Necros came back to Furya. They still had a team of skilled scientists for that, they said, who worked on new ways to cut the rock to expand the city as the population grew, who worked on air and water filtration, sewerage, food production, small arms and then the big stuff, ground-to-air missiles they hoped might keep them alive one day in the caves that _might_ protect them from any radioactive fallout. That was apparently another thing they were working on: whether the minerals in the cave structure and the evolution of Furyan biology would save them if they needed it.

He took the silver back to Kat and then left the mountains with the hunting team, six of them this time including him and that was starting to push the capacity of the ship by the time they had six of those strange animals dead and on board. He took a portion’s worth of stew in a heatproof flask and went back to the room, poured it out into a bowl and sat there at the table while Vaako turned over his replacement blade in his hands and then, after he was done, he told him what he was thinking. 

“That’s insane,” Vaako said, when he was done. 

“Says the guy who gave himself up to the Necromongers to save his fucking planet.” Vaako grimaced, which was as good as conceding the point. “Look, haven’t you ever thought how fucking ironic the whole Necro bullshit is?” Riddick said. “You’re all converts, and you _all_ converted so you wouldn’t die.” Vaako frowned, which Riddick took as a good sign to continue. “C’mon, you worship death but you want to live and fuck, Vaako, Furyans don’t even believe in God. Tell me that’s not irony.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“I want you to tell me what you think they’d do.”

“You want me to tell you what I think the Necromonger fleet would do if you put a bomb on the flagship and said _freedom or we’ll blow you into the underverse_?”

Riddick shrugged. “That’s about the size of it.”

Vaako laughed, shaking his head as he dropped it into his hands. “Obedience without question,” he said. “Loyalty till underverse come. You think no one in the fleet believes that?”

“Do you?”

Vaako looked up at him, quickly, sharply. “And what if I say I do?”

“Then I’d call you a liar.”

Vaako sighed and rubbed at his eyes. “I’ve killed more people for that oath than you’ve met in your whole life,” he said. “Have you ever seen an elderly Necromonger? A Necromonger child? We incinerate hospitals and murder pregnant women and you want to know if I _believe_ , Lord Marshal.”

Riddick looked at him, really _looked_ at him across the table as he was falling the fuck apart. He wasn’t sure whether he wanted to stop him or just watch it happen, see what exactly would be left if he let his former first commander crumble there in a tiny stone room under a mountain on a planet they’d both left thirty-seven years ago. It’d started to feel a lot more like he was fighting for Vaako’s world than his own but he could live with that and he reached across the table, wrapped one hand tight around Vaako’s wrist, squeezed hard. Apparently he’d made his choice. 

“What if I order you to do it,” he said, not quite a question, and Vaako looked at him like the entire planet had just keeled over on its side. Riddick came around the table, straddled Vaako’s thighs there on his chair. “What would you do then?”

“Obedience without question,” Vaako said, looking him straight in the eye.

Riddick kissed him hard to seal the deal.

***

They took it to the council the following day, an emergency meeting Kat called once she’d heard the idea and had time to shout down her immediate reaction of _that’s insane!_ She was very like her brother in a lot of ways. 

After initial laughter, the others on the council all came round, too. The problem was that it sounded totally nuts, even Riddick knew that, but there was a distinct possibility there that it could work: he and Vaako would call the fleet and say their ship had suffered some kind of failure, and as dumb as it would seem to them to bring the _whole_ fleet there to Furya they’d be intrigued to see the planet again, or for the first time for the majority, the place where the only people who’d really scared Lord Marshal Zhylaw had lived. They’d have no idea that there were still Furyans left there alive because that had always been the very best kept of secrets. 

They’d go aboard, and they’d set a bomb and then they’d tell them they had three options: die where they were, take small ships and head to the gateway to the underverse if their faith was still inclined that way, or come down to the planet and stay there, live there, eventually die there. Some of the Necros would start to age again and maybe others wouldn’t. Only a small number would ever need to eat, only a smaller number would ever be able to procreate and they could rebuild the city, join the Furyans because they’d killed their own homeworlds and there’d be no more living under a threat of eventual destruction. The ones who chose to stay would be the ones who’d never really believed in the first place; they’d be the ones who wanted to live. 

And so, Vaako put in the call, sent it out and gave Riddick a look that said he’d better be damn sure. He really was. 

It’d take five weeks for the Necro fleet to arrive, at least, and while they did have work to do it was by no means anything out of their reach. The scientists would put together a bomb of conveniently enriched fissile materials, and that would take roughly two weeks to do right. Other than that, all they had to do was make sure the shitty little ship was out of the launch bay and looking sufficiently disabled when the fleet came into orbit and they’d be ready to go so in the meantime life went on because fuck if there was anything else for it. Riddick took scavenging parties out to the city to bring back anything they thought they could use, took hunting parties out to the forest and picked them up in the evening. They started fishing the river to add that to their diets and at the end of each of the first few days Riddick went down to the arena to watch Vaako’s grandson fight. 

Riddick started tutoring him after the first couple of days once he’d figured out that the fights didn’t _have_ to be all form and style; he took him into the training hall after hours and roped in Vaako, too, wound up with others joining after the end of the first week till they’d got a class together all officially learning to fight dirty and not just in that weird-ass graceful Furyan martial art. The second week Vaako looked at him in just the wrong way as they taught and all Riddick could do was stride over there and hit him as hard as he could, his fist straight across his jaw so hard it almost could’ve broken Riddick’s fingers or Vaako’s face and after everyone was gone he took him on his knees on the mat, hard and fast and breathless till they were both spent in minutes and fucking shaking. Vaako leant back against his chest and Riddick wrapped his arms around his waist, still inside him. 

Elle joined the class the next week, turned out to be their best student by far though that was hardly a surprise given the fact she was a master of that damn fool martial art. In no time at all she was all knees and elbows and feints and trips and trash talk that apparently she got from her mother and Riddick found that fucking hilarious though Vaako didn’t want to talk about it and Riddick didn’t push. She still didn’t seem particularly fond of Riddick but she warmed back up to her father, at least, in pieces, a smile now and then that Vaako just about managed to return. Katya started coming along after that and Kat sat by and watched with the two-year-old till it was a regular goddamn Vaako family affair and sometimes Riddick would let them get on with it, go over to sit with Kat and shoot the breeze like he wasn’t meant to be teaching a class, unofficial as it was. 

The bomb was done by the end of the second week and that was good news but Riddick hadn’t really expected that it would be an issue at all. The scientists, though they were the weirdest fucking set of scientists Riddick had ever encountered in their leather aprons and knives though he guessed he was yet to meet an unarmed Furyan over the age of eighteen, taught him what to do with it after they’d done all necessary testing in the third week and taught Vaako along with him. Then they went out to the training hall and got stuck into another night’s training session. 

The students were good, _really_ good, not quite the way Riddick or Vaako were but getting closer. Simon and Elle started taking their own groups once the hall got fuller, fifty students coming in each night then sixty, including two council members and three of the scientists. Riddick brought in a couple of the hunting team, Simon’s buddies, got them all working together and they were pretty good, too. Then he went back to the room with Vaako, the long way, the walk that took them forty minutes or more in total silence. Riddick would eat while Vaako read old books he’d read before, books about Furyan history since colonisation, one work of fiction one of his ancestors had written and Riddick could see where he’d gotten his flair for the dramatic. Then they’d go over the plan or they’d fuck or they’d sit at the table and Riddick would push a sterilised pin into Vaako’s chest along his collarbones like that was normal somehow and he’d look like he felt better for it, like feeling pain made him feel less like a Necro and more like a Furyan. 

The fourth week came and the council finally told the people what to expect in the coming weeks. The news was met with what Riddick was told was typical Furyan verve: they wanted to fight, not send a bomb like they were afraid and cowering in their mountain. Of course, that was exactly why they had a council in the first place, a kind of regulatory system for the interesting Furyan collective that had apparently always wanted to fight all comers and Riddick found that strangely amusing. People started to stop him in the streets, telling him what they thought of his plan or what they _didn’t_ think of it but in the end the verdict was pretty much unanimous: okay, so they hated the Necros, but they got the point that none of them had ever really had a choice. And yeah, so maybe on Furya they’d most have rather died than convert, but that didn’t meant they held everyone in the whole damn universe to the same high standard. If any of them wanted to stay, they’d be allowed to stay. Maybe they’d be helpful and it wasn’t like they were living in the city anyway.

“What are you going to do?” Kat asked Vaako, one night in the fifth week when they’d all sat down to dinner together at Elle’s big dining table. 

“He’s going to stay,” Katya said, immediately, though then a frown formed and she looked at Vaako, tilted her head. “You _are_ going to stay, right?”

Vaako looked at Riddick while all eyes turned to him; under the table, Riddick gripped at Vaako’s thigh so hard it’d leave bruises there shaped just like his fingers. 

“He’s going to stay,” Riddick said. 

Vaako nodded slowly. “I’m going to stay,” he said, his voice tight. 

They went the long way back after dinner, walking side by side along the way just like they always did. 

“Was it an order?” Vaako asked, breaking the silence unexpectedly. 

“Does it need to be?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it does.” 

Riddick suspected that wasn’t an order he was prepared to give.

***

The armour felt strange the day the Necros finally made it to Furya. Vaako helped him with it, clasping it in place, then Riddick helped Vaako with his though neither one really needed the assistance. Then they stepped out of the ship back into the launch bay and Kat looked at them both with an appraising eye. 

“You look the part,” she said, and Riddick glanced at Vaako, seeing the muscle work in his jaw. Kat hugged him over the uniform, the light armour he wore not even close to what he’d had as Riddick’s first among commanders but it was enough that he could see exactly what was going on in Vaako’s head: he thought he had no place there anymore, no place at all, because of what he’d had to do to save them. Riddick would’ve liked to slap him in the face and tell him to man the fuck up but somehow it didn’t seem appropriate in front of Kat. 

They left with the bomb and landed in the valley before any Necromonger sensors could find them; they transmitted their coordinates, disabled the skiff and waited for the transport ship. It wouldn’t be long, and then they’d see how the plan would actually unfold. Riddick reached across the cockpit and fastened the collar around Vaako’s neck, clipped the leash back into place, wrapping the leather around his palm. Vaako looked at him as he did it, watched him, his lips pressed thin together. It had been a while since he’d been Riddick’s prisoner and not something else.

“You’ve been gone too long, lord marshal,” Dame Vaako said when they’d reboarded, standing there in the docking bay in her long red dress. Her good friend the Purifier was also in attendance, a few of the commanders with them but that didn’t pose a threat. Not until Riddick took a backpack full of warhead and set it by the engine core and when the message went out throughout the fleet, the response was fucking insane. Three commanders lunged for them and then, finding Riddick and Vaako well protected, proceeded to slit their own throats in some kind of nonsensical protest. The Purifier howled and Dame Vaako, coolly, put her hand on her friend’s shoulder, squeezing tight. Somehow, she didn’t even seem surprised. It was a skill she’d cultivated, Riddick guessed.

“Take us all down to the planet,” she said, addressing the fleet and all its members in her familiar voice, not just the pilots. “We’ll make our decisions on the surface.”

Three days of negotiations followed, not with the Furyans but between the Necros themselves once the ships were all in Furyan missile locks and the gravity of the situation was abundantly clear. Some thought it was a test until the one of the commanders took off his helmet and his cape and said he wanted to stay right there on Furya and underverse be damned. Others followed in quick succession, hundreds then thousands all pouring off of the ships into the ruined city in the sunlight. Some of them had no fucking clue where they were from or when they’d been taken; some of them remembered everything. The only thing that really mattered was they were _relieved_ to be gone. Kat and the council were there to welcome them to Furya.

And then there was Dame Vaako, and there was the Purifier, and then seventy-eight others who remained by the ships. 

“I don’t want to stay,” Dame Vaako said, when Riddick came to her on the third day. He had to admit he hadn’t thought she’d been one of the faithful but maybe he’d been wrong and everything she’d done had been for the faith. Or maybe she just had people waiting for her in the underverse - had had no fucking clue and wasn’t about to get into that with her, not her of all people when she played everything so close to the chest and he wasn’t totally convinced he gave a fuck anyway. So he just gave her the ship they’d need to get them there, authorised the upload of the gateway’s coordinates into their nav computer, and then that was it; she smiled a faint smile as she clasped his arm in a strange kind of goodbye, raised one hand of farewell to her husband, and she and her fellows turned to the ship and their journey to the gateway to the underverse. 

Riddick stepped down off of the boarding ramp. Vaako was waiting there. 

“So, you’re staying?” Riddick said, as the ramp closed and the ship’s airlocks began to seal. They walked away a few metres, out of the down-draught from the ship’s engines, then turned to watch. 

“I’m going to stay with _them_ ,” Vaako said, with a gesture at the hundreds of thousands of Necromongers standing there in the streets, spilling off of ships into the sun. It was chaos out there and while Riddick grimaced, while he turned away and shook his head with a sick feeling down in his stomach, he understood it. They were going to need a leader and Vaako was pretty much what they had left. He’d be good at it, damn him, even Riddick could see that.

They stood together as the ship left, buffeted by the engine draught and the dust it kicked up around them, but they stayed to see it go, shoulder-to-shoulder, close. Then Riddick turned. 

“I guess I’ll see you around,” he said. 

Vaako didn’t reply. Riddick pulled the key from around his neck, dropped it at Vaako’s feet and walked away.

***

It was pretty damn impressive to see what a million Necros could do in a year when properly motivated. 

Riddick saw the work coming on in stages as he started up then maintained a shuttle service there between the city under the mountain and the city the Necros were in the process of rebuilding. They lived on the ships in the start, going back in when necessary though obviously in the start they were pretty much all able to work night and day with the right lighting conditions, and they’d put up huge floodlights running on generators so darkness didn’t slow them down. They went for the power first, hauled an engine core out of the flagship and installed it into the ruined power station, piece by piece in stages till they had sustainable juice throughout the city, then they moved on to the drainage and sewers then the water pipes. They made it look easy and Riddick guessed maybe in a way it was when they didn’t need food or rest and had all the equipment they needed right there on the ships they’d landed in. None of the Necros had homeworlds left so it made sense in a way that they stayed. 

They split up into teams after that, started talking about the lives they’d had before and any specialisms they might’ve picked up after and so people who knew construction and architecture started work on the ruined buildings, technicians went to work on maintaining power and machinery and mechanics started dismantling one of the bigger ships for its useful parts because fuck if they didn’t lack pretty much every material but stone till Riddick and the council pointed out they could ask the Furyans for whatever they needed. They started sending out shipments of metal ores from the mines and the Necros started sending in shipments of wood they were getting from the forests, then over the months more and more Furyans went out into the city and took up homes there themselves. Necros who knew farming from their former lives went out to herd in the cattle they’d found grazing by the river, started breeding rabbits and chickens and weird-ass creatures Riddick had never seen before in his life so he guessed maybe they were something humans hadn’t brought with them to Furya with the colonisation. The Furyans weren’t hot on animal husbandry so left them to it, but when hunting parties went into the forests there were Furyans there with them, pretty much leading the charge.

As the months went on, some of the more recent converts started eating again, sleeping again, and all the additional food turned out to be a useful thing. The Furyans sent out samples of their fruits and vegetables and the Necros started growing them in fields outside the city, and some of the scientists from the hydroponics labs under the mountain came out to join in with that. There were shuttles back and forth three times a day and Riddick started training up new pilots once they’d let the Necros help them build up their old ships and make them useable again. Vaako’s grandson Simon turned out to be pretty handy at the stick and took the first shift every morning after the first three months, once training was complete. Simon told him after a fight one night that he’d taken a group of schoolkids out there, some kind of class project talking to the Necros about who they’d been and where they’d come from, collecting stories about the worlds that were now all dead because none of them but Furya had ever escaped. There were support meetings going on out there, Simon said, one of his grandfather’s initiatives, talking about the past and how in hell they could live with the things they’d done. Of course, he said, Furyans didn’t give a damn about survivors guilt.

He’d see Vaako there sometimes, across a street as he hung back by the ship, watching other people load it; sometimes Vaako saw him too but they didn’t speak, didn’t even get close enough to speak, not once in a fucking year. The Necros he spoke to told him Vaako had set up a council, five of them including himself who worked out their difficulties and decided on projects and liaised with the Furyan council and Riddick guessed that was true because sometimes Kat came in to dinner and while she wouldn’t say she’d spoken to him she’d look different for the evening, lighter, happier. Riddick spent a lot of nights over at Kat’s and she’d tell him stories about how life had used to be while they got hammered on her strong-brewed homemade liquor and he tried to feel like he belonged anywhere else but there with her. She asked once or twice if he’d like to just move on in with her, but he stayed in the room that had briefly been a cell. She seemed to get it even if he didn’t, though there were times that he was jerking off in the dark to the thought of a surly, chatty jackass with long dark braids or the Furyan with the chip on his shoulder he’d known after that, times when he guessed maybe it made sense that he stayed there after all.

A year came around quickly and Elle planned a party for Kat’s seventy-first birthday, asked Riddick over because for some damn fool reason he’d been pulled into dinners and all fucking sorts of things since Vaako had decided to stay out there with the repatriated Necromongers. They didn’t mention him, the elephant in the room just like he always was as they sat around the table, eating meat Riddick had brought in from the city without even really setting out to do so because apparently some of the Necros still liked to think of him as their lord marshal, even if most of them were teasing him about it more than they were serious. Luckily, he took it pretty damn good-naturedly given who he was and his general demeanour, and occasional gifts weren’t a bad thing.

“How long do Furyans usually last, anyway?” he asked over dinner, making Simon snicker and Elle cuff the both around the back of the head. He rubbed at the spot dramatically.

“The oldest on record was one hundred twenty-nine,” Kat told him. “But I’ve never heard of a natural death before a hundred years.” He guessed that made sense, considering what he knew of the people and the fact they didn’t seem to get sick a day in their lives, all that crap about minerals and radiation that he hadn’t even tried to follow. 

“So I’ve got another thirty years listening to you bitch and moan about _kids these days_?”

Kat smiled wryly. “If you’re lucky,” she said. “There’s always a chance I’ll get sick of you long before I die.”

She paused then, as the others went on with their conversation and their food, and took a sip of her drink before she spoke again, her voice lower, just for him. 

“I miss him too, you know,” she said, for no one else to hear. And he didn’t say he missed him and he didn’t say he didn’t but it didn’t matter either way because he was pretty sure she knew more about what he might’ve felt than he did himself. 

***

He shuttled a ship full of metal ore out into the centre of the city a couple of weeks after that, landing in what had used to be a massive central square where they’d held markets and events, or so Kat had told him once. The Necros were building it all back up, had gotten the stones into place and were now working on the metalwork with some of the older Furyans on hand to work out the details of how it should look. There were designs scrawled on papers on a bench nearby that scattered as Riddick landed and he stopped to help retrieve them once the ramp was down, stooping in the perpetual dust to scoop them up and set them back down with their owners. Some of the designs had a pretty Necro feel to them but he guessed that wasn’t totally out of keeping with what he’d seen of Furyan art. It could be pretty gruesome stuff, something about celebrating life through death that sometimes made sense and sometimes really didn’t. 

Crouching in the square, he looked up and caught a glimpse of someone sitting there on scaffolding with a torch and a welding mask, working. He didn’t have to be psychic to see who it was even with the mask right over his face, not just because there were two blades in a leather sheath over the guy’s back as he sat there straddling a wooden scaffold plank, filthy as he was. 

“Vaako,” Riddick called, no fucking idea why he’d done it as soon as he had, and Vaako looked up, looked around. He killed the torch in his hands, took off the welding mask and it _was_ him, unsurprisingly, in thick leather gloves and a thick leather apron, looking just the same as he always had if dirtier around the edges. He hopped down onto the stone paving stones and Riddick watched him do it, watched him pull off gloves and apron and leave them slung up over the scaffolding, watched him pause there just looking at him across the square like he wasn’t sure what his next move would be until he started to walk toward him. Riddick was pretty sure they both looked surprised that was what he’d chosen to do.

“It’s been a while,” Vaako said, rubbing his palms over his shirt and then his fingers over his hair. 

“About a year,” Riddick replied, then looked away around the square. “It’s looking good.”

“We’re getting there.” 

They paused, Riddick leaning back against the ship like maybe that made him look nonchalant and he wasn’t just noticing the fact that Vaako’s hair was growing in and slicked back with sweat and maybe something like traces of mechanical grease. It was hot as hell out there and Riddick guessed maybe that had something to do with why they called it Furya.

“I’ll show you around,” Vaako said. And so Riddick abandoned the ship and went with him, just like that. 

They must’ve walked for nearly three hours in the end, the sun getting lower all the while, Vaako telling him all about the buildings and the reconstructions and stopping by halls to duck inside and see how things were progressing, calling out to workmen who were for the most part out of armour though some of them did still persist with it for reasons no one discussed or felt the need to. They went by the training rooms where he’d used to teach, nearly completed, and Kat had said she’d send them mats to set it up properly though the weapons would probably all come from the Necro ships at first, except maybe she’d send a few of those, too. They went by what had used to be a blacksmith’s workshop and the place was up and running again, the three Necro smiths all in there with their goggles and aprons and metalwork but they were working on a sculpture for the marketplace, Vaako said, to replace the centrepiece the Necros had destroyed in the war. Maybe Aereon had been right all along because Riddick had done this, or at least made it possible, with a little help from his Furyan friends. 

Then they took a couple more turns and came into a broad, familiar street; Riddick wasn’t surprised when Vaako led him to the place Kat had taken him on that first trip into the city, the home he’d shared with his fucking insanely huge family, and the place was fixed up, perfect, dusted down and mended, a jacket slung over the back of a kitchen chair and work gloves on the table with a set of knives and Vaako gestured for him to take a seat while he washed his hands and fetched him a mug of water. Riddick hadn’t realised how thirsty he’d gotten in the dust and sun and he gulped the water down completely, a couple of drops escaping over his chin and down his neck but neither of them would give a damn except maybe Vaako did because his gaze followed them down into the neck of Riddick’s sleeveless shirt. He looked at him, dark-eyed and conflicted if that was what that look meant and not something else entirely, then he took the mug away and refilled it, set it back down on the table and Riddick did the same thing again, except maybe this time the spill was more deliberate. 

Vaako’s mouth came down at Riddick’s jaw, moved down, followed the path the water had just taken, leaning over him there over the table since Riddick was still sitting in a chair. He didn’t sit much longer, pushed himself up and let Vaako push him back, up against the nearest wall as his teeth scraped his neck and went down, fingers tugging the neck of his shirt to expose a section of collarbone where he sucked hard, raised a bruise as Riddick took two handfuls of the back of Vaako’s sweat-damp shirt. Vaako pulled back but only for a second, a flash of something on his face like anger or bewilderment or desperation before he kissed him, hard, leaning against him against the wall.

They tugged at each other, breathless, stupid with it, made it up the stairs without falling though Riddick had no clue how. The bedroom had changed, plainer and emptier, and Vaako tugged at Riddick’s clothes as Riddick tugged at his, undressing each other like some kind of argument, like a fight they hadn’t had but needed to. Boots came off, socks, sweat-damp shirts and they were fucking disgusting with it, dirty and dusty and maybe once Vaako would’ve hated that, would’ve said something wry about how fucking _human_ that was, how alive, but neither of them gave a damn right at that particular moment when they were naked and falling onto the bed, when Vaako still had that goddamn collar on the dresser under the window and Vaako shifted up on top of him, cocked pressed to his belly, so fucking familiar that Riddick laughed and Vaako rolled his eyes. The bed was unmade. Riddick had to wonder if Vaako was actually sleeping again these days.

They did it on their knees, both sets of hands gripping tight at the headboard, Vaako’s chest pressed to Riddick’s back once he’d slicked himself and pushed inside him. Then Vaako’s hands went down, squeezed high up inside Riddick’s parted thighs, thumbs stroking there by the base of his erection. He took him in one hand and Riddick rested his head back over Vaako’s shoulder, took a breath and almost growled it out as Vaako turned his head and brushed his mouth over the pulse beating double-time in his neck. 

“You taste _disgusting_ ,” Vaako said, with an air of breathless amusement, and so they moved it into the bathroom, into the shower, the water cool but not cool enough that Riddick had any trouble getting Vaako to raise one knee, put his foot up on the step so he could push into him from behind. They did it hard and slow, grinding, thrusting, the force almost jarring but it wasn’t like either of them cared with Riddick’s hands tight at Vaako’s wet hips under the spray, Vaako leaning there against stone tiles so he could push back hard to meet him. Slow as it was, it didn’t last long; Riddick’s hand went down around Vaako’s cock and stroked and it didn’t take long after that till Vaako was done and his breathless, tense fucking orgasm took Riddick with him. Vaako nudged him away, turned, pulled him into a kiss that ended with the two of them slipping like a pair of fucking idiots and sprawling half out of the shower with Vaako’s knee in Riddick’s thigh and Vaako’s arm under Riddick’s elbow until they pulled themselves up and out and killed the shower with a shared look of slightly pained amusement. 

“That could’ve been more successful,” Riddick said, as Vaako tossed him a towel.

“I’ve had worse,” Vaako replied, starting to towel himself off, too.

Vaako had clean clothes that he said would probably fit him, a pair of pants that were snug over the thighs and a sleeveless shirt that tugged tight over his abdomen but that was fine, he’d worn a whole lot worse. They went downstairs after that, boots abandoned in the bedroom and the stone floor cold underfoot but the day had been warm enough that the chill of it seemed pretty desireable. Vaako showed him around the rest of the place, rooms off of rooms like a maze with a small training room in the basement and his mother’s workshop out back looking just like he said it used to. Vaako had changed without really changing, still fucking dour but there were flashes of something else. Maybe rebuilding parts of the life he’d used to know had helped, or maybe it was just his fucking support groups, who knew. 

“You’ve been busy,” Riddick said, leaning against the doorframe as Vaako set a couple of stray tools back into their racks on the walls. 

“I’ve been working on it for a while,” Vaako confirmed. 

“You gonna ask Kat and the kids to come live out here?”

He turned back, looked over at Riddick as he hopped up to sit there barefoot on a wooden worktop, swinging his legs, heels beating against the closed panels across the front. “I’ve been thinking about it, yes.”

“You know I go where Kat goes, right?”

Vaako raised his brows. “I didn’t know you two were so close.”

Riddick shrugged. “We remind each other of someone we used to know.”

Vaako smiled wryly, maybe ruefully. “Someone who stayed behind?”

He didn’t ask him why he’d stayed out there with the Necros because he got it already and had since the moment Vaako had made that decision because yeah, okay, he’d been needed there, and likely he still was. And he didn’t ask why he hadn’t asked him to stay out there with him because he got that, too; Riddick had had some work of his own to do, not just persuading the Furyans that the Necros weren’t going to flood into the mountains and kill them in their fucking sleep but the other stuff, the personal stuff, figuring out if he even belonged there at all. So he just stepped in closer, gave Vaako time to get the fuck out of the way if he’d wanted to except he didn’t; Vaako slipped down from the worktop and they took two quick steps together, met each other in a kiss as they pressed in tight against each other. 

“We could use another pilot out here,” Vaako said, carefully, once they’d pulled back. 

Riddick raised his brows but he was smiling, maybe teasing, like that had ever been their thing before but he thought maybe now it could. He’d give it a shot at the very least. “That’s what you’re going with?” he said. “Way to make a guy feel special.”

Vaako pursed his lips but there was a glint in his eye that made him look just like his sister. 

“You want someone to whisper sweet nothings, Riddick, you came to the wrong fucking planet.”

He bit at Vaako’s throat, Vaako pushed him back hard against the worktop and he guessed he could live with that. No more mercs would be coming for him out there in the back of beyond, at least, and maybe Vaako would start to age one day and maybe he wouldn’t but really, who gave a fuck about that.

And maybe it turned out Furya was his home after all.


End file.
